longshore avocations.  The women, always more patient—­as to their nature the show was more piquant than to the men’s—­had withdrawn with their knitting to benches well within eyeshot.  The children, playing around, grew more and more immersed in their games; which, nevertheless, one or another would interrupt from time to time to point and ask a question.  Above the Court-house the town clock chimed its quarters across the afternoon heat.

The Collector, glancing up in the act of turning a page, spied Mr. Trask hobbling down an alley towards the Jail.  Mr. Trask, a martyr to gout, helped his progress with an oaken staff.  He leaned on this as he halted before the stocks.

“Tired?” he asked.

“Damnably!” answered the Collector with great cheerfulness.  “It takes one in the back, you see.  If ever the Town Fathers think of moving this machine, you might put in a word for shifting it a foot or two back, against the prison wall.”

Mr. Trask grinned.

“I suppose now,” he said after a pause, “you think you are doing a fine thing, and doing it handsomely?”

“I had some notion of the sort, but this confinement of the feet is wonderfully cooling to the brain.  No—­if you dispute it.  Most human actions are mixed.”

Mr. Trask eyed him, chin between two fingers and thumb.  When he spoke again it was with lowered voice.  “Is it altogether kind to the girl?” he asked.

“Eh?” The Collector in turn eyed Mr. Trask.

“Or even quite fair to her?”

“Oh, come!” said the Collector.  “Tongues?  I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I dare say not.”  Mr. Trask glanced up at the windows of a two-storeyed house on the left, scarcely a stone’s throw away, a respectable mansion with a verandah and neat gateway of wrought iron.  “But at the end of this what becomes of her?”

The Collector shrugged his shoulders.  “I have thought of that, at all events.  My coach will be here to take her home.  It lies on my road.  As for me, I shall have to mount at once and ride through the night—­a second test for the back-bone.”

“Ride and be hanged to you!” broke out Mr. Trask with a snarl of scorn.  “But for the rest, if your foppery leave you any room to consider the girl, you couldn’t put a worse finish on your injury.  Drive her off in your coach indeed!—­and what then becomes of her reputation?”

“—­Of what you have left to her, you mean?  Damn it—­you to talk like this!”

“Do not be profane, Captain Vyell. . . .  We see things differently, and this punishment was meted to her—­if cruelly, as you would say—­still in honest concern for her soul’s good.  But if you, a loose-living man—­” Mr. Trask paused.

“Go on.”

“I thank you.  For the moment I forgot that you are not at liberty.  But I used not that plainness of speech to insult you; rather because it is part of the argument.  If you, then, drive away with this child in public, through this town, you do her an injury for which mere carelessness is your best excuse; and the world will assign it a worse.”