The flute is the instrument of mild men; and Robert Lucas had mildness for a chief quality.  At the age of thirty-five, in the high noon of his manhood, he showed to the world a friendly, unenterprising face, neatly bearded, and generally a little vacant.  The accident that gave him a Russian mother was his main qualification for the post he now held—­that of representative of a firm of leather manufacturers in the Russian town of Tambov.  He spoke Russian, he knew leather, and he could ignore the smells of a tanyard; these facts entitled him to a livelihood.

To right and left, as he looked forth, the cobbled street was dark; but opposite, in the silversmith’s shop, there were lights, and, below, a small crowd had gathered.  He watched wonderingly.  He knew the silversmith well enough to nod as he passed his door—­a young, laborious man with a rapt, uncertain face and a tumbled mane of black hair.  There were also a little, grave wife and a fat, grave baby; and these, when they were visible, received separate and distinctive nods, and always returned them.  The hide-sellers and tanners were, for the most part, crude and sportive persons with whom he could have nothing in common; they lived, apparently, on drink and uproar; and he had come to regard the silversmith and his family as vague friends.  He pressed his face closer to the glass of the double casement to see more certainly.

The little shop seemed to be full of lights and people, and outside its door there was a press of folk.  The murmur of voices was audible, though he could distinguish nothing that was said.  But now and again there was laughter.  It was the laughter that held him gazing and apprehensive; it had a harsher note than mirth.  It seemed to him, too, that some of the men in the doorway were in uniform; he could see them only in outline, mere black silhouettes against the interior lights; but there was about them the ominous cut of the official, that Russian bird of ill-omen.  And then, while yet he doubted, there sounded the very keynote of disaster.  From somewhere within the silversmith’s shop a woman screamed, sudden and startling.

“Now, now!” said Robert Lucas, at his window, grasping his flute nervously.  And, as though in answer to his remonstrance, there was again that guttural, animal laughter.  He frowned.

“I must see into this,” he told himself very seriously.

He turned from the window.  His pleasant room, with the bright lamp on the table and the music leaning beside it, seemed to advise him to proceed with caution.  He and his life were not devised for situations in which women screamed on that tense note of anguish and terror; he had never done a violent thing in all his days.  There was no clear purpose in his mind as he pulled open his door to go out—­merely an ill-ease that forced him to go nearer to the cause of those screams.  He had descended the stairs and was fumbling at the latch of the street-door before he realized that he was still holding the flute.