Now, as she walked along, wrapped in her plaid cape, her thought was one long tumultuous succession of painful or passionate images, interrupted none the less at times by those curious self-observing pauses of which she had always been capable.  She had been sitting for hours beside Mrs. Hurd, with little Willie upon her knees.  The mother, always anaemic and consumptive, was by now prostrate, the prey of a long-drawn agony, peopled by visions of Jim alone and in prison—­Jim on the scaffold with the white cap over his eyes—­Jim in the prison coffin—­which would rouse her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and body.  Minta Hurd’s love for the unhappy being who had brought her to this pass had been infinitely maternal.  There had been a boundless pity in it, and the secret pride of a soul, which, humble and modest towards all the rest of the world, yet knew itself to be the breath and sustenance, the indispensable aid of one other soul in the universe, and gloried accordingly.  To be cut off now from all ministration, all comforting—­to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when the neighbours should come in and say, “It is all over—­they have broken his neck—­and buried him”—­it was a doom beyond all even that her timid pessimist heart had ever dreamed.  She had already seen him twice in prison, and she knew that she would see him again.  She was to go on Monday, Miss Boyce said, before the trial began, and after—­if they brought him in guilty—­they would let her say good-bye.  She was always thirsting to see him.  But when she went, the prison surroundings paralysed her.  Both she and Hurd felt themselves caught in the wheels of a great relentless machine, of which the workings filled them with a voiceless terror.  He talked to her spasmodically of the most incongruous things—­breaking out sometimes with a glittering eye into a string of instances bearing on Westall’s bullying and tyrannous ways.  He told her to return the books Miss Boyce had lent him, but when asked if he would like to see Marcella he shrank and said no.  Mr. Wharton was “doin’ capital” for him; but she wasn’t to count on his getting off.  And he didn’t know that he wanted to, neither.  Once she took Willie to see him; the child nearly died of the journey; and the father, “though any one can see, miss, he’s just sick for ’im,” would not hear of his coming again.  Sometimes he would hardly kiss her at parting; he sat on his chair, with his great head drooped forward over his red hands, lost in a kind of animal lethargy.  Westall’s name always roused him.  Hate still survived.  But it made her life faint within her to talk of the murdered man—­wherein she showed her lack of the usual peasant’s realism and curiosity in the presence of facts of blood and violence.  When she was told it was time for her to go, and the heavy door was locked behind her, the poor creature, terrified at the warder and the bare prison silences, would hurry away as though the heavy hand of this awful Justice were laid upon her too, torn by the thought of him she left behind, and by the remembrance that he had only kissed her once, and yet impelled by mere physical instinct towards the relief of Ann Mullins’s rough face waiting for her—­of the outer air and the free heaven.