“Good morning, George. Don’t bother. It’s still very early. I’m all right.”

“What would you like, sir? Coffee? Tea?”

“It matters so much, doesn’t it? Let’s say tea.”

So the tea was made, and David drank two cups. He did not eat anything, but he smoked his pipe for a while. He felt — well, not exactly nervous, but a little excited, as when, during student days, he had made his first knife cut into living flesh.

Presently a stranger entered the room and pinioned his arms with a leather strap; he submitted to this without word or murmur. Then he saw the Governor and the Chaplain standing by. “Good morning,” he said, and smiled at them.

Across the graveled yard there was a small building whose use he had not realized before, but it was not far to walk to it, through the rain and in the chilly morning air. Then, obeying the gestures of the stranger, he stood on a little platform with his head under a wooden beam. A white hood was put over his head. Just at that moment he heard George cough, and then (they were his last words) he said, in a voice that came muffled through the hood: “That cold of yours isn’t any better, George.” The noose slipped over his head and he suddenly remembered Leni, and her little crushed smile, and that she too, at the same moment in Midchester … Come with me, go with me, I don’t know where, but there are a few of us, we make a good company already, we carry love in our hearts, we are not alone …

The lever moved, and the little doctor’s body fell into the pit, from which, later in the day, it was retrieved for burial inside the prison precincts.

EPILOGUE

I WAS IN CALDERBURY a few weeks ago and as I passed the corner of Shawgate I noticed that workmen were pulling down the old house. One of the inside walls was exposed to view, and on it hung what seemed, at a distance, to be a picture that no one had bothered about. Even while I watched, it was taken down by a workman, and later I saw it handed over to someone in the little crowd which, in days of unemployment, and especially in a place like Calderbury, always collects round any scene of activity.

He was a young man of perhaps thirty, slim and hot at all robust-looking, attractive in an eager, ascetic way, and rather shy in manner as he took the picture, wrapped it in a newspaper he carried, and tried to slip away unobserved. But the crowd turned their slow curious eyes on him and someone called out: “Let’s have a look, mister.” At that he almost bolted, crossing the road at a tangent, and colliding with me on the opposite curb. The picture fell with a tinkle, and I made some apologetic remark, though it was really his own fault. He answered: “Oh, it doesn’t matter — the glass was smashed already.”