Rolfe walked
slowly over the thick Turkey carpets and rugs with which the floor was
covered, glanced at the sofa curiously, and then turned down the sheet
from the dead man's face.
At the time of his death Sir Horace Fewbanks was 58 years of age, but
since death the grey bristles had grown so rapidly through his
clean-shaven face that he looked much older. The face showed none of the
wonted placidity of death. The mouth was twisted in an ugly fashion, as
though the murdered man had endeavoured to cry for help and had been
attacked and killed while doing so. One of Sir Horace's arms--the right
one--was thrust forward diagonally across his breast as if in
self-defence, and the hand was tightly clenched. Rolfe, who had last seen
His Honour presiding on the Bench in the full pomp and majesty of law,
felt a chill strike his heart at the fell power of death which did not
even respect the person of a High Court judge, and had stripped him of
every vestige of human dignity in the pangs of a violent end. The face he
had last seen on the Bench full of wisdom and austerity of the law was
now distorted into a livid mask in which it was hard to trace any
semblance of the features of the dead judge.
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