with your own dignity--Handel's music and a clergyman to make
murder look like piety! Do you suppose I am going to help you?
You've asked me to choose the rope because you don't know your
own trade well enough to shoot me properly. Well, hang away and
have done with it.

SWINDON (to the chaplain). Can you do nothing with him, Mr.
Brudenell?

CHAPLAIN. I will try, sir. (Beginning to read) Man that is born
of woman hath--

RICHARD (fixing his eyes on him). "Thou shalt not kill."

The book drops in Brudenell's hands.

CHAPLAIN (confessing his embarrassment). What am I to say, Mr.
Dudgeon?

RICHARD. Let me alone, man, can't you?

BURGOYNE (with extreme urbanity). I think, Mr. Brudenell, that as
the usual professional observations seem to strike Mr. Dudgeon as
incongruous under the circumstances, you had better omit them
until--er--until Mr. Dudgeon can no longer be inconvenienced by
them. (Brudenell, with a shrug, shuts his book and retires behind
the gallows.) YOU seem in a hurry, Mr. Dudgeon.

RICHARD (with the horror of death upon him). Do you think this is
a pleasant sort of thing to be kept waiting for? You've made up