"Can't you see it?" he said. "That little back parlour with its fussy ornaments. The three of them standing round the table, Hepworth's hands nervously clutching a chair. The reproaches, the taunts, the threats. Young Hepworth—he struck everyone as a weak man, a man physically afraid—white, stammering, not knowing which way to look. The woman's eyes turning from one to the other. That flash of contempt again—she could not help it—followed, worse still, by pity. If only he could have answered back, held his own! If only he had not been afraid! And then that fatal turning away with a sneering laugh one imagines, the bold, dominating eyes no longer there to cower him.
"That must have been the moment. The bullet, if you remember, entered through the back of the man's neck. Hepworth must always have been picturing to himself this meeting—tenants of garden suburbs do not carry loaded revolvers as a habit—dwelling upon it till he had worked himself up into a frenzy of hate and fear. Weak men always fly to extremes. If there was no other way, he would kill him.
143
