wrong-headed. Her drawing-room
was probably the only place in the wide world where an Assistant
Commissioner of Police could meet a convict liberated on a
ticket-of-leave on other than professional and official ground. Who had
brought Michaelis there one afternoon the Assistant Commissioner did not
remember very well. He had a notion it must have been a certain Member
of Parliament of illustrious parentage and unconventional sympathies,
which were the standing joke of the comic papers. The notabilities and
even the simple notorieties of the day brought each other freely to that
temple of an old woman's not ignoble curiosity. You never could guess
whom you were likely to come upon being received in semi-privacy within
the faded blue silk and gilt frame screen, making a cosy nook for a couch
and a few arm-chairs in the great drawing-room, with its hum of voices
and the groups of people seated or standing in the light of six tall
windows.

Michaelis had been the object of a revulsion of popular sentiment, the
same sentiment which years ago had applauded the ferocity of the life
sentence passed upon him for complicity in a rather mad attempt to rescue
some prisoners from a police van. The plan of the conspirators had been
to shoot down the horses and overpower the escort. Unfortunately, one of
the police constables got shot too. He left a wife and three small
children, and the death of that man aroused through the length and
breadth of a realm for whose defence, welfare, and glory men die every
day as matter of duty, an outburst of furious indignation, of a raging
implacable pity for the victim. Three ring-leaders got hanged.
Michaelis, young and slim, locksmith by trade, and great frequenter of
evening schools, did not even know that anybody had been killed, his part
with a few others being to force open the door at the back of the special
conveyance. When arrested he had a bunch of skeleton keys in one pocket
a heavy chisel in another, and a short crowbar in his hand: neither more
nor less than a burglar. But no burglar would have received such a heavy
sentence. The death of the constable had made him miserable at heart,
but the failure of the plot also. He did not conceal either of these
sentiments from his empanelled countrymen, and that sort of compunction
appeared shockingly imperfect to the crammed court. The judge on passing
sentence commented feelingly upon the depravity and callousness of the
young p