Most wolfishly the wolfish eyes watched the judge while these words were spoken; quicker the working jaws moved, lower the poor form crouched as nearer the sentence came. As a vicious dog trembles and threatens in every hair at the stick upraised to strike, so, by every aspect of his mien, Egbert Hunt trembled and threatened as the ultimate words approached. "Penal servitude for that term"--as the dog yelps and springs so he screamed and sprung: a dreadful wordless scream, a savage spring against the dock, arms outflung. Warders closed about him; but he was at his full height, arms and wolfish face directed at Lady Burdon. "You done it on me!" he screamed. "You might ha' saved me! You--! You--cruel--! I'll do it back on yer! Wait till I'm out! I'll come straight for yer, you an' your--son! I'll do it on--" A warder's hand came across his mouth. He bit through to the bone and had his head free before they could remove him. "I've never had a fair chance, not with you, you--Tyrangs!--tyrangs all of yer!--tyrangs! You're the worst! God help yer when I come for yer! Tyrangs! ... Tyrangs!..." They carried him away. II "Oh, five years!--Five years!" Percival cried when he read the news. "Poor, poor old Hunt! Five years!" He was sitting comfortably propped in a big chair in the garden behind "Post Offic," Aunt Maggie and Ima with him, and his weakness could not restrain the moisture that came to his eyes. "Five years, Aunt Maggie! He was one of my friends. I liked him--always liked him. He was always fond of me--jolly good to me. When I think of him with his vegules and his sick yedaches! Five years--poor old Hunt!" He was very visibly distressed. "Everybody is fond of you, dear," Aunt Maggie said sympathetically. "That's just it!" he said--"that's just it!" and he threw himself back in his chair and went into thoughts that were come upon him and that her words exactly suited: thoughts that were often his in the days of his sickness when he lay--was it waking or sleeping? he never quite knew. They presented the cheery group of all his friends, all so jolly, jolly good to him. Himself in their midst and they all smiling at him and stretching jolly hands. But a gap in the circle--Mr. Amber's place. Another gap now--Hunt. It appeared to him in those feverish hours--and now again with new reason and new force--that outside that jolly circle of friends there prowled, as a savage beast about a camp-fire, some dark and evil menace that reached cruel hands to snatch a member to itself and through the gap threatened him. Within the circle the happy, happy time; beyond it some other thing. Life was not always youth, then? not always ardour of doing, fighting, laughing, loving? Menace lurked beyond.... What?...