She had grabbed the nearest torch and was holding it above the face of Tarsis. Every eye turned to the window where she stood, the curtain jerked back, disclosing the man for whose blood she was mad cowering in the embrasure. “Murderer!” she shrieked at him, shaking a fist in his face. “You killed my child!” He was like a figure of stone, save for his eyes, which contracted and expanded as fast as he gasped for breath. One of his hands gripped a paper knife that he had caught up when the door began to yield. It was in the hot blood of them to fall upon him then and there, and so it would have been but for Red Errico. He sprang forward and, with one hand pushing back La Ferita, the other upraised, he commanded them to wait. “Not yet!” he called out. “You forget! We must give the robber a trial. They do as much for us when we take rather than starve. A trial, do you understand? There are some questions we want to ask him, neh, comrades?” At first he was answered with howls of dissatisfaction, but with them were mingled cries of approval; and presently, the idea of the leader’s joke sinking into their wits and gaining general favour, there were many demands, amid mocking laughter, for a trial. “Great fun! Bravo, Errico! A trial for the robber of the poor!” The surge of the crowd did not move Hera from where she stood--backward against the wall. She saw them lay hold of Tarsis, wrench the paper-cutting toy from his grasp, and, lifting him bodily, carry him through the jeering, laughing herd, and set him upon his cherished Napoleonic table. Then they flocked around with vituperative malice. In an hour of mastery they displayed the worse traits of their class. The women put out their claws and scratched his face, pulled his hair, and spat upon him, and covered him with the vilest epithets of their patois. It was the barbarous culmination of a movement which to Tarsis had always seemed so far away. Red Errico, exercising the function of judge, tweaked the prisoner’s nose and ordered him to sit up and look happy. La Ferita, her scar glowing hideously, kept crying, “Down with him, I say! Bah for your trial! He killed my child!” The air was stifling with the smoke of torches. Tarsis coughed and was barely able to hold up his head. “Why do you persecute me?” he said, his voice faintly audible. “I have never harmed you.” The few who heard burst into derisive laughter and passed the words along; and the whole pack took them up with such rough comments as they could invent. “And so, my fine fellow,” was Red Errico’s sneer, “you have never harmed us! Bravissimo! But you are a magnificent liar, signore--magnificent! Now for the trial! Question No. 1: How comes it that you are the possessor of millions, that you live in a grand house, eat the fat of the earth, while we who have worked for you, we who have produced the things that have brought your wealth, are scarcely able to keep body and soul together?”