kept their hands still ready to seize the engineer's arm if he made
the slightest attempt at motion. Eustace felt they were watching him
as one might watch a madman. For a moment they were silent. Trevennack
was the first to speak. His voice had an earnest and solemn ring in
it, like a reproving angel's. "How can you tell what precious life may
be passing below?" he said, with stern emphasis, fixing Le Neve with
his reproachful eye. "The stone might fall short. It might drop out of
sight. You might kill whomsoever it struck, unseen. And then"--he
drank in a deep breath, gasping--"you would know you were a murderer."

Walter Tyrrel drew himself up at the words like one stung. "No, no!
not a murderer!" he cried; "not quite as bad as a murderer! It
wouldn't be murder, surely. It would be accidental homicide--
unintentional, unwilled--a terrible result of most culpable
carelessness, of course; but it wouldn't be quite murder; don't call
it murder. I can't allow that. Not that name by any means. . . .Though
to the end of your life, Eustace, if you were to kill a man so, you'd
never cease to regret it and mourn over it daily; you'd never cease to
repent your guilty carelessness in sackcloth and ashes."

He spoke so seriously, so earnestly, with such depth of personal
feeling, that Trevennack, starting back, stood and gazed at him slowly
with those terrible eyes, like one who awakens by degrees from a
painful dream to some awful reality. Tyrrel winced before his
scrutiny. For a moment the elder man just looked at him and stared.
Then he took one step forward. "Sir," he said, in a very low voice,
half broken with emotion, "I had a dear son of my own once; a very
dear, dear son. He was killed by such an ACCIDENT on this very spot.
No wonder I remember it."