While counsel wrangled and pleaded, while this little group of men rounded up by the police to stand sponsors for Anarchy and expiate its horrid creed, so that good citizens might sleep peacefully nights, faced death, the three girls sat and stared at the spectacle. It passed slowly, and the prisoners were condemned by a jury of their peers quite promptly, and the grave judge sentenced them "to hang by their necks until dead." At the dreadful words Milly gasped, then sobbed outright. No matter what they had done, at least what _he_ had done, how wrong _his_ ideas about society were, _he_ was too young and too handsome for such an awful fate. If he had only had about him from the beginning the right influences, if some woman had loved him and guided him aright,--Milly hoped that he might yet be spared, pardoned if possible. Mopping the tears from her eyes she left the court-room for the last time, with a vague sense of the wretchedness of life--sometimes. * * * * * That very night, however, she was as gay and bright as ever at the Kemps' dinner. A fascinating young lawyer was of the party, a newcomer to the city, who dared to raise his voice in that citadel of respectability, the Kemps' Gothic dining-room, and declare that the whole affair was a miserable travesty of justice,--a conspiracy framed up by the police. "They have the city scared," he said, "and nobody dares say what he thinks. The newspapers know the truth, but the big men make the papers keep quiet." It was all quite thrilling, Milly thought. Perhaps, after all, her young man was not a villain. The table of sober diners sat very still, but afterwards the banker pronounced what the young lawyer said to be "loose talk" and "wicked nonsense." And Milly knew one young man who would never be asked again to the Granger Avenue house. After the verdict came all sorts of legal delays, and Milly largely lost interest in the anarchists. The drama had evaporated, and though she continued to read what the papers printed about the prisoners, more personal affairs crowded in to blot out from her mind that sense of a large, suffering humanity which she had had for a few moments. When the governor was finally induced to intervene and commute some of the sentences, she had a muddled notion that he had deprived Society of its just vengeance, that the well-to-do, well-meaning people had failed to get full punishment for the shocking deeds of the anarchists. And that was all. About a year later the young blue-eyed anarchist, in whom Milly had been interested, blew off the top of his head with a bomb. But Milly was very busy just at that time with other matters. II MILLY ENTERTAINS Of much more importance to Milly than the fatal bomb was her first real party. She had long desired to entertain.