* * * * *

At about the same moment Myra and Joe emerged from the West Tenth Street house and started for the court-house.  They started, bowing their heads in the wind, holding on to their hats.

“Whew!” muttered Joe.  “This is a night!”

Myra did not dare take his arm, and he spoke a little gruffly.

“Better hang on to me.”

She slipped her arm through his then, gratefully, and tried to bravely fight eastward with him.

Joe was silent.  He walked with difficulty.  Myra almost felt as if she were leading him.  If she only could have sent him home, nursed him and comforted him!  He was so weary that she felt more like sending him to bed than dragging him out in this bitter weather.

More and more painfully he shuffled, and Myra brooded over him as if he were hers, and there was a sad joy in doing this, a sad glory in leading him and sharing the cruel night with him.

In this way they gained the corner of Sixth Avenue.  Across the way loomed the illuminated tower-topped brick court-house.

“Here it is,” said Joe.

Myra led him over, up the steps, and through the dingy entrance.  Then they stepped into the court-room and sat down on one of the benches, which were set out as in a school-room.

The place was large and blue, and dimly lighted.  The judge’s end of it was screened off by wire netting.  Up on a raised platform sat the magistrate at his desk, his eyes hidden by a green shade, his bald head radiant with the electric light above him.  Clerks hovered about him, and an anaemic indoor policeman, standing before him, grasped with one hand a brass rail and with the other was continually handing up prisoners to be judged.  All in the inclosed space stood and moved a mass of careless men, the lawyers, hangers-on, and all who fatten upon crime—­careless, laughing, nudging, talking openly to the women of the street.  A crass scene, a scene of bitter cynicism, of flashy froth, degrading and cheap.  Not here to-night the majesty of the law; here only a well-oiled machine grinding out injustice.

Joe and Myra were seated among a crowd of witnesses and tired lawyers.  The law’s delay seemed to steep the big room with drowsiness; the air was warm and breathed in and out a thousand times by a hundred lungs.  Myra looked about her at the weary, listless audience.  Then she looked at Joe.  He had fallen fast asleep, his head hanging forward.  She smiled sadly and was filled with a strange happiness.  He had not been able to hold out any longer.  Well, then, he should sleep, she thought; she would watch alone.

Then, as she sat and gazed, a drunken woman in the seat before her fell sound asleep.  At once the big special officer at the little gate of wire netting came thumping down the aisle, leaned close, and prodded her shoulder with his forefinger, crying: 

“Wake up, there!”