7/16 A room full of living men and women who had just heard what some of them considered their doom pronounced by a dead man. They had carried him out of his house, cold, powerless, screwed into the casket. They had laid him in the ground beneath the village spire, and yet it was his word that troubled, enraged, disappointed, surprised, and envenomed them. Beyond their gratitude, reproaches, taunts, or fury, he lay helpless and dumb--yet the most terrible and inaccessible of despots. The legal gentlemen moved about with a professional and indifferent air, as if they assisted at such an occasion as medical students at dissections. |