The Squire came first into the room. Behind him was Captain Kleber Willard, and jostling at his back were Deputy Sheriff Purday and his helper, alert and officious. They wore the air of officers who knew that this method of handling a prisoner was not regular, but who had been overmastered by the Squire’s authority. With the group was another man, the venerable pastor of the village church, whom they had overtaken making his way with a lantern along the tempest-strewn street toward the house of mourning. Willard stepped inside the door, his knees bending lifelessly at each step, his head wagging low between his shoulders. His bloodshot eyes rolled shamefacedly from countenance to countenance. The solemn regard of his neighbours shifted to the worn floor. They had no consolation for him. His face began to pucker with the grimace of the strong man who is trying to hold back the tears. “Where are our little ones, Kleber?” His wife had thrown herself upon him. She screamed the question over and over. “Squire Look--Parson Emmons--some one--oh, for God’s sake--tell her!” His sobs choked him. With his arm about his wife he stumbled away to a corner of the room, dragging her with him, and while the neighbours sat silent and sympathetic, the women sobbing softly, the men grinding their rough knuckles into their palms, the husband and the wife, their foreheads against the wall, washed away in the first tears they had ever shed in a common woe all the wrack of the petty quarrels, the little heart-burnings, the frettings and the misunderstandings--all so mean and small in this shadow of the mightiest tragedy in their lives. After many, many minutes they were quiet, and clung to each other like people in the dark, afraid. Captain Willard trembled until his teeth rattled together. He was nerving himself to face the picture of his guilt and his ingratitude--his crime! That was it! His crime. It was a picture on which the true light had been shed by Squire Phineas Look, whispering to him in a corner of the selectmen’s office. For some minutes the lawyer and the clergyman had been conversing apart in an undertone, and now the minister came along to the husband and wife and gently drew them away from the corner.