ex-butcher to lay on the whip-cord as he had never laid it on before.
“Trust me!” came the reply through the open window. “Look at my forehead, sir. I’ll cut his bowels out for that!”
Mr. Strachan sprang up and shut the window with a bang. He was strangely shaken. Many were the floggings he had ordered, or inspired, and even witnessed, without a qualm. There was a something in this man’s face that had appealed to him and troubled him from the first. As he shut the window there was a something else in the white sheen of the doomed nude back over yonder that made him feel instinctively there was the remnant of a gentleman, tied up for whipping like a cur. And this conviction made the Anglo-Indian, who was the remnant of a gentleman himself, more uncomfortable than he had felt for years.
He turned his back on the window and sat down, listening against his will, in the very chair from which he had delivered pre-arranged judgment. He heard it once, and winced and twitched his shoulders, as though the stroke had fallen on them. He heard it again. He began mumbling the end of a new cheroot and listening to the flies on the window-pane, whose buzzing had suddenly become very loud. But louder yet were those horrible sounds outside; and even more horrible was the exultant croak of the old doctor at regular intervals between the sounds.
“Comb your lashes, my good man!” his rasping voice kept crying. “Comb those lashes—comb those lashes!”
Strachan found himself counting them, with that striking face still before him, and those desperate eyes waiting upon his as they had waited here while he was delivering his mealy-mouthed address; and looking at him as they
