the seamstress's thin
cheeks. Her face had now but little likeness to the face with which she
had stood confronting Hughs when she informed him of the little model's
flight. None of the triumph which had leaped out of her bruised heart,
none of the strident malice with which her voice, whether she would
or no, strove to avenge her wounded sense of property; none of that
unconscious abnegation, so very near to heroism, with which she had
rushed and caught up her baby from beneath the bayonet, when, goaded by
her malice and triumph, Hughs had rushed to seize that weapon. None of
all that, but, instead, a pitiable terror of the ordeal before her--a
pitiful, mute, quivering distress, that this man, against whom, two
hours before, she had felt such a store of bitter rancour, whose almost
murderous assault she had so narrowly escaped, should now be in this
plight.

The sight of her emotion penetrated through his spectacles to something
lying deep in the old butler.

"Don't you take on," he said; "I'll stand by yer. He shan't treat yer
with impuniness."

To his uncomplicated nature the affair was still one of tit for tat.
Mrs. Hughs became mute again. Her torn heart yearned to cancel the
penalty that would fall on all of them, to deliver Hughs from the common
enemy--the Law; but a queer feeling of pride and bewilderment, and
a knowledge, that, to demand an eye for an eye was expected of all
self-respecting persons, kept her silent.

Thus, then, they reached the great consoler, the grey resolver of
all human tangles, haven of men and angels, the police court. It was
situated in a back street. Like trails of ooze, when the tide, neither
ebb nor flow, is leaving and making for some estuary, trails of
human beings were moving to and from it. The faces of these shuffling
"shadows" wore a look as though masked with some hard but threadbare
stuff-the look of those whom Life has squeezed into a last resort.
Within the porches lay a stagnant marsh of suppliants, through whose
centre trickled to and fro that stream of ooze. An old policeman, too,
like some grey lighthouse, marked the entrance to the port of refuge.
Close to that lighthouse the old butler edged his way. The love of
regularity, and of an established order of affairs, born in him and
fostered by a life passed in the service of the "Honorable Bateson" and
the other gentry, made him cling instinctively to the only person in
this crowd whom he could tell for certain to