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"Within the Law"

Frightful to him,
it must in truth be vastly worse to her. There was her womanly
sensitiveness to enhance the innate hideousness of the thing that
had been done here before their eyes. There was, too, the fact
that the murderer himself had been the man to whom she owed her
life. Yes, for him, Dick realized with poignant sympathy, the
happening that night was terrible indeed: for her, as he guessed
now at last, the torture must be something easily to overwhelm
all her strength. His touch on her grew tender beyond the
ordinary tenderness of love, made gentler by a great underlying
compassion for her misery.
Dick drew Mary toward the couch, there let her sink down in a
huddled attitude of despair.
"I never saw a man--killed before!" she said again. There was a
note of half-hysterical, almost childish complaint in her voice.
She moved her head a little, as if to look into the shadows where
*IT lay, then checked herself violently, and looked up at her
husband with the pathetic simplicity of terror.
"You know, Dick," she repeated dully, "I never saw a man killed
before.


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