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finished her account, had been a characteristic one.
    "I am sorry to learn that our good English bees are insufficient to his purposes," he had said.
    Now she was sitting beside him, in a back room of the town hall. Through the lone window from the vacant lot beyond there radiated as if drawn by the old man himself the murmur of bees, insistent as the stifling afternoon itself. The old man had been stoking and sipping at his pipe for the last fifteen minutes as they awaited the prisoner. The smoke of his tobacco was the foulest that she, a girl raised in a house with seven brothers and a widowed father, had ever been obliged to inhale. It hung in the room as thick as sheepshearing and made arabesques in the harsh slanting light from the window.
    As she watched the vines of smoke twisting in the sunlight, she tried to picture her son as he went about the business of murdering that fine, vital man. Nothing that she saw in her imaginings wholly persuaded her. Mrs. Panicker, nee Ginny Stallard, had seen two men killed, on different occasions, during her girlhood. The first was Huey Blake, drowned by her brothers in Piltdown Pond during a semi-friendly bout of wrestling. The other was her father, the Reverend Oliver Stallard, shot at Sunday dinner by old Mr. Catley after he went off his head. Though all the world blamed her black husband for the unstable character of her one and only son, Mrs. Panicker suspected that the fault lay squarely with her. The Stallard men had always been blackguards or misfortunates. She was almost inclined to view the fact that it was taking Reggie so long to be brought up from the cells as yet one more example, though heaven knew none was needed, of her son's poor character. She could not imagine what was keeping him.
    The sudden touch of the old man's dry fingers on the back of her right hand made her heart leap in her chest.
    "Please," he said, with a glance at her fingers, and she saw that she had taken off her wedding ring and held it pinched tightly between the thumb and first. Clearly she had been tap-tapping the ring against the arm of her chair for quite some time, perhaps from the moment she sat down in the waiting room. The sound of it echoed dimly in her memory.
    "I'm sorry," she said. She looked down at the spotted hand on hers. He removed it.
    "I know how difficult this must be," he said, and smiled in a reassuring way that was, surprisingly, reassuring. "Mustn't despair."
    "He didn't do it," she said.
    "That remains to be seen," the old man said. "But so far, I confess, I am inclined to agree with you."
    "I have no illusions about my son, sir."
    "The hallmark of a sensible parent, no doubt."
    "He took a disliking to Mr. Shane. It is true." She was a truthful woman. "But Reggie takes a disliking to everyone. He can't seem to help it."
    Then the door opened, and they brought poor Reggie in. There was a plaster on his cheek, and an oblong welt across his left temple, and his nose looked too big, somehow, and all purple across the bridge. She experienced the false realization that these injuries had befallen him during his fatal struggle with Mr. Shane, and the fleeting hope of a claim of self-defense darted through her thoughts before she remembered having overheard Detective Constable Quint tell her husband that Shane was killed from behind, by a single blow to the head; there had been no struggle. A look at the faces of the policemen, eyes steady on the corners of the room as they handled Reggie to the empty chair, and the true realization set in.
    The old man rose and jabbed the air with the stem of his pipe in the direction of her son.
    "Has this man been harmed?" he said, his voice thin even to her ears, petulant, as if there were a kind of moral obviousness to the beating her son had been given by the police that trumped any craven protest he or anyone might register. The horror of it vied in her thoughts with a low rough voice whispering Had it coming. Had it coming now a very long