All that he could take in of the effect of his words was the look of his employer’s back, as the man moved away, not at all in the direction of the clergyman’s black-coated figure, but straight towards the little group of spectators who surrounded the seated form of Roger Monk, occupied just then in keeping the score.

Mr. Urquhart’s back, as Wolf followed it with his eyes at that moment, seemed to him to resemble the back of Judas Iscariot in that popular picture entitled Pieces of Silver , of which there used to hang a cheaply coloured reprint in his grandmother’s house at Weymouth. It did more than stoop with its usual aristocratic bend, this back. It sagged, it lurched, it wilted. It drifted towards that bench of heedless spectators as if it had been the hindquarters of the Biblical scapegoat, driven forth into a wilderness whose desolation was not material, but psychic. The neat clothes that hung upon it only accentuated the ghastliness of this back’s retreat.