“Oh, my baby, my baby!” she moaned.  Ned Turk heard the cry and repeated it, screaming comically, “Oh, my baby, my baby!” All the crowd took it up, “Oh, my baby, my baby!” She shut her ears with her hands, and wished that wherever Harry was, he might fall dead for having left her and his child to this.

Then from the porch of the cottage at the angle of the High Street and the Thudersley Road, the cottage where Cliffe, the blind man, lived with his pretty wife, there stepped out Peacey.  For a moment he shrank back into the shadow, holding a handkerchief in front of his face, but she had recognised the tall, full body that was compact and yet had no solidity, that suggested a lot of thick fleshy material rolled in itself like an umbrella.  It was her last humiliation that he should see this thing happening to her.  She lifted her chin and tried to walk proudly.  But he had come forward out into the roadway and was coming towards her and her followers.  He did not seem quite aware of what he was approaching.  He walked delicately on the balls of his large and light feet, almost as though the occasion was joyful; and he held his face obliquely and with an air of attention, as if he waited at some invisible table.  There hung about him that threatening serial quality which made it seem that in his heart he was ridiculing those who tried to understand his actions before he disclosed their meaning in some remote last chapter.  It struck her, even in the midst of her agony, that she disliked him even more than she disliked what was happening to her.

She had thought that he would smile gloatingly into her sweaty face and pass on.  But she saw swimming before her a fat, outstretched hand, and behind it a stout blackness of broadcloth, and heard her pursuers halt and cease the beating of their tin cans, and came to a swaying standstill, while above her there boomed, gently and persuasively, Peacey’s rich voice.  She could not pin her fluttering mind to what it said, because she felt sickish at the oil of service, the grease of butlerhood that floated on it, but phrases came to her.  He was asking the village people what would happen when the squire came home and heard of this; and reminding them that they were all the squire’s tenants.  A silence fell on her pursuers.  From the rear old Mr. Goode’s kind voice said something about “A bit of boys’ fun, Mr. Peacey”; Ned Turk piped, “We don’t mean no ’arm,” and the crowd dispersed.  It shuffled its heels on the cobbles; it raised jeers which were mitigated and not sent in her direction, but were still jeers; it beat its tin cans in a disoriented way, as if it were trying to save its self-respect by pretending that Mr. Peacey had been so much mistaken in the object of their demonstration that there was no harm in going on with it.