He stood with his back to the room, looking out upon the square filled with a surging mob. In the middle, upon a raised scaffold, stood the terrible red-painted uprights with the gleaming knife under the linking beam, poised ready for the swift fall of its diagonal edge. The mob swirled in a sudden turbulence under the windows. He knew what it meant. There, forcing its slow passage through the maddened crowd, came the fatal cart--a rough vehicle filled with hatless men and women whose necks were bare and whose hands were bound, men and women who seemed deaf to the vociferations of the bloodthirsty mob that raved about them. He shuddered--slipped his right hand into his pocket, held it there, his gaze fastened in horrible fascination upon that slowly moving cartload of already almost lifeless human beings. He saw, clearly, only one figure, a girl in white, and he waited--in an agony which held him rigid. The cart lurched its slow way to the scaffold, stopped. The victims began to descend. He saw the figure in white mount the steps to the machine, saw it turn its head at the last moment toward his window--and, as though it were the signal expected, he whipped the pistol from his pocket, glimpsed the dark hole of its barrel, and fired. The man and woman in the chair stared into a crystal ball whose depths were suffused with a milky cloud. “Oh, Jim!” she murmured. “_The last time----!_” “Shh!” he said, with a squeeze of her hand. “Look! It’s coming again!” Once more the cloud parted--they peered, breath held for further revelations, into a crude contrast of bright light and intense shadow, upon a striped awning at an angle from a wall glaring in the sun, upon a narrow street where dust rose yellow like an illumined cloud above a dark throng of Asiatics, their white robes almost blue in the shadow, who gesticulated and pushed each other as they packed themselves into a semicircle of eager faces. Their vision adjusting itself to the violent juxtaposition of high light and deep shadow, they stared into the comparative sombreness under the awning, to the object which held the interest of the crowd.