horrible German murderer who had strangled his employer's wife, while a
female accomplice played the piano to divert her children's attention from
her cries, swooned away at the news. O'Flynn's old mother went into
hysterics and became quite uncontrollable in her grief when, a few minutes
later the news, "Five years' penal servitude," was brought down.



CHAPTER V

TO THE RESCUE


The first weeks of my experience in the Anarchist camp had flown by with
astounding rapidity. The chapter of my experiences had opened with the
expulsion of an alleged spy and _agent provocateur_, and had closed
with a sentence of penal servitude passed on two of my new-found comrades.
Between these two terminal events I seemed to have lived ages, and so I
had, if, as I hold, experience counts for more than mere years. Holloway
and Newgate, Slater's Mews and the Middle Temple, barristers and
solicitors, judges and juries and detectives; appointments in queer places
to meet queer people--all this had passed before me with the rapidity of a
landscape viewed from the window of an express train; and now that the
chapter had closed, I found that it was but the preface to the real
business I had set my shoulder to.

The morning after the conclusion of the trial I met Armitage by
appointment, and together we wended our way towards Slater's Mews. The
doctor was preoccupied, and for some minutes we proceeded in silence; the
problem of what to do with the _Bomb_ was evidently weighing on his