If it turned to the left, it would conduct Gwynplaine to the justice hall in Southwark.  In that case there would be little to fear, some trifling municipal offence, an admonition from the magistrate, two or three shillings to pay, and Gwynplaine would be set at liberty, and the representation of “Chaos Vanquished” would take place in the evening as usual.  In that case no one would know that anything unusual had happened.

If the cortege turned to the right, matters would be serious.

There were frightful places in that direction.

When the wapentake, leading the file of soldiers between whom Gwynplaine walked, arrived at the small streets, Ursus watched them breathlessly.  There are moments in which a man’s whole being passes into his eyes.

Which way were they going to turn?

They turned to the right.

Ursus, staggering with terror, leant against a wall that he might not fall.

There is no hypocrisy so great as the words which we say to ourselves, “I wish to know the worst!” At heart we do not wish it at all.  We have a dreadful fear of knowing it.  Agony is mingled with a dim effort not to see the end.  We do not own it to ourselves, but we would draw back if we dared; and when we have advanced, we reproach ourselves for having done so.

Thus did Ursus.  He shuddered as he thought,—­

“Here are things going wrong.  I should have found it out soon enough.  What business had I to follow Gwynplaine?”

Having made this reflection, man being but self-contradiction, he increased his pace, and, mastering his anxiety, hastened to get nearer the cortege, so as not to break, in the maze of small streets, the thread between Gwynplaine and himself.

The cortege of police could not move quickly, on account of its solemnity.

The wapentake led it.

The justice of the quorum closed it.

This order compelled a certain deliberation of movement.

All the majesty possible in an official shone in the justice of the quorum.  His costume held a middle place between the splendid robe of a doctor of music of Oxford and the sober black habiliments of a doctor of divinity of Cambridge.  He wore the dress of a gentleman under a long godebert, which is a mantle trimmed with the fur of the Norwegian hare.  He was half Gothic and half modern, wearing a wig like Lamoignon, and sleeves like Tristan l’Hermite.  His great round eye watched Gwynplaine with the fixedness of an owl’s.

He walked with a cadence.  Never did honest man look fiercer.

Ursus, for a moment thrown out of his way in the tangled skein of streets, overtook, close to Saint Mary Overy, the cortege, which had fortunately been retarded in the churchyard by a fight between children and dogs—­a common incident in the streets in those days. “Dogs and boys,” say the old registers of police, placing the dogs before the boys.