“Oh, bother!” he exclaimed, in extreme exasperation when the instrument proved too long for his pocket, and went out carrying it like some remarkable and ornate baton.

The small crowd before the silversmith’s shop numbered, perhaps, a hundred people, and even before his eyes were acclimatized to the darkness he smelt sheepskin coats and tan-bark.  He touched one big man on the arm and asked a question.  The lights in the shop lit up the fellow’s hairy face and loose grin as he turned to answer.

“Eh?” said the man.  “Why, it’s a Jew that the police are clearing out.  Did you hear the Jewess squeal?”

“Yes, I heard,” said Lucas, and moved away.

He was cut off from the door of the shop by the backs of the crowd, and passed along the street to get round them.  Inside the lighted house the baby had begun to cry, but there was no more screaming.  He had a sense that unless he hurried he might be too late for what was in preparation.  The crowd seemed to be waiting for some culminating scene, with more than screams in it.  A touch of nervous excitement came to fortify him, and he thrust in between two huge slaughterers, whose clothes reeked of the killing sheds.

“Make way!” he said breathlessly, as they turned on him.

One of them swore and would have shoved him back, and others looked round at the sound of strife.  Lucas put up an uncertain hand to guard the blow.  It, was the hand that held the flute, whose silver keys flashed in the lights from the shop.

“Ha!” grunted the slaughterer, arrested by that sight.  He looked at Lucas doubtfully, his neat clothes, his general aspect of a superior.  “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Make way!” repeated Lucas.

It seemed to confirm the slaughterer in his suspicion that this was a personage to be deferred to.

“Hi, there!” he bellowed helpfully.  “Give room for his Excellency.  Let his Excellency come through!  Don’t you see what he’s got in his hand?  Make way, will you?”

He bent his huge, unclean shoulder to the business of clearing a path, and drove through like a snow-plough.  Lucas followed along the lane that he made, and came to the pavement close by the shop.

It was fortunate that events marched sharply from that point, and forced him to act without thinking.  He had some vague notion of finding the officer in charge of the police and speaking to him.  But before he could move to do so there was a fresh activity of the people within the bright windows; he saw something that had the look of a struggle.  Voices babbled, and the crowd pressed closer; and suddenly, from the open doorway, two figures reeled forth, clutching and thrusting.  One was in uniform, the other was a woman.  For a couple of seconds they wrenched and fought, staged before the crowd on the lighted doorstep; and then the woman broke away and ran blindly towards the spot where Lucas stood.  She had, he saw suddenly, a child in her arms that cried unceasingly.