The White Room by Fergus Hume

The two men stood in silence, looking down on the wretched creature shivering in the chair. Walter Fane had never been much of a man, and now that his guilt had been brought home to him, he looked more of a craven than ever. A rat would have showed a braver front, for when in a corner that animal will fight. But Fane did not even show his teeth. He lay in the chair, huddled up, with his face covered, and moaned like a rabbit taken in a trap.

There seemed no doubt as to his guilt, and none was in the mind of the two men who had hunted him down. The evidence was without a flaw, and if Fane escaped the gallows, he so richly-deserved, it would be more a miracle than by any natural occurrence. The diary of his wife, identified him with the husband who had grown weary of her. The evidence of the key showed how she had entered the house, which had originally been furnished for her, and it only remained to learn from the lips of the assassin precisely how the crime had been committed. Fane made no attempt to defend himself. He did not even state that he had been at Westcliff-on-Sea on the night, and at the very time of the murder. He simply lay there crushed, and in spite of the horror of the cold-blooded crime he had committed, in spite of his cowardliness, the two men pitied a human being who could fall so low, and behave so basely.