"Is she having a snooze?"
"You will not wake her."
"This is one of your games." The sort was defined by an adjective, omitted. "What's your game? What the Hell are you at?" He said this as to himself.
"Go in. You will find your mother." Gwen took back the dog's chain from the table-leg, and the low thunder died down.
She hardly analysed her own motives. One may have been to touch the heart of the brute, if he had one; another to convince him, without a long parley, of his mother's death. He might have disputed it, and in any case she could not have refused him the sight of his own mother's body.
She could not have restrained that dog had he acted on his obvious impulse to strangle, rapidly and thoroughly, this vermin intruder. But he was an orderly and law-abiding dog, who would not have strangled a rat without permission.
Gwen did not catch the convict's exclamation at sight of his mother, beyond the "What the...!" that began it. Then he was silent. She saw him go nearer without fear of ill-demeanour on his part, and touch the cold white hand, not roughly or without a sort of respect. As well, perhaps, for him; for Gwen was quite capable of loosing that dog on him, under sufficient provocation. She thought he seemed to examine the fingers of the left hand. Then he came back, and they returned to the front-room. She was the first to speak.
"Are you satisfied?"
"I couldn't have sworn to her myself, not from her face, but I made sure." Probably he had looked for the cut finger, his own handiwork of thirty-odd years ago. He said abruptly, after a moment's pause:—"I don't see nothing to gain by hanging about here."
"Nothing whatever."