Deane was turning over a book of engravings at one of the tables, but not without an eye for all that was going forward. Drelincourt was lounging against the framework of the farther window.
"In this suspense there lurks a torture worthy of a grand inquisitor," murmured the latter. "I wonder whether I or that poor devil awaiting sentence in the dock suffers the more on our invisible rack."
Having glanced at his watch, he took to slowly pacing the room, his hands behind his back.
"And yet, what need to wonder? He is but a clod, callous, brutalized, degraded; and though his life is doubtless as sweet to him as mine is to me, there are in me a thousand springs of feeling and emotion, each a separate source of torture, of which such as he can know nothing. In my case the stake is more, infinitely more, than is involved in the premature ending of a life by which I have never set any special store. There's the pity of it! If the issues of our actions affected ourselves alone, we could afford to suffer in silence, and bow our necks to the stroke with something like equanimity; but the Eumenides who wait on wrong doing ever contrive to stab us through the hearts of our dearest and our best."
Young Deane's furtive glances followed Drelincourt every time the latter's back was turned on him.
"I have never seen Mr. Drelincourt so restless as he seems this afternoon," he muttered to himself. "There's something on his mind--that's clear. Can it be that he's troubling himself about the result of the trial? Yet, why should he? It's not as if he were a vindictive man. However it may go, it can matter little to him."
"That boy is eying me and wondering what the deuce is the matter," was Drelincourt's unspoken thought. "Eh bien! Let us give him something else to think about."
Drawing up a chair close to Deane, he seated himself astride it, and rested his crossed arms on its back.
"While I was out this morning," he began, "I was told something which put me about more than I like to own."
"Indeed, sir! I am very sorry to hear it," answered the young fellow, as he shut up the book of engravings and turned a sympathetic face toward the other.