She was deathly pale, but her black eyes flashed impatience and excitement. She even drew her hand out of the arm where Aldous was tenderly holding it, and walked on erect by herself.
"I have been with poor Dynes," said Aldous, sadly; "we had to take his deposition. He died while I was there."
"He died?"
"Yes. The fiends who killed him had left small doubt of that. But he lived long enough, thank God, to give the information which will, I think, bring them to justice!"
The tone of the magistrate and the magnate goaded Marcella's quivering nerves.
"What is justice?" she cried; "the system that wastes human lives in protecting your tame pheasants?"
A cloud came over the stern clearness of his look. He gave a bitter sigh—the sigh of the man to whom his own position in life had been, as it were, one long scruple.
"You may well ask that!" he said. "You cannot imagine that I did not ask it of myself a hundred times as I stood by that poor fellow's bedside."
They walked on in silence. She was hardly appeased. There was a deep, inner excitement in her urging her towards difference, towards attack. At last he resumed:
"But whatever the merits of our present game system may be, the present case is surely clear—horribly clear. Six men, with at least three guns among them, probably more, go out on a pheasant-stealing expedition. They come across two keepers, one a lad of seventeen, who have nothing but a light stick apiece. The boy is beaten to death, the keeper shot dead at the first brush by a man who has been his life-long enemy, and threatened several times in public to 'do for him.' If that is not brutal and deliberate murder, it is difficult to say what is!"