The uniformed man who had tried to hold her came plunging after her; his face was creased in clownish and cruel smiles.  Lucas saw the thing stupidly; his mind prompted him to nothing; he stood where he was, empty of resource.  He was directly in the flying woman’s path, and she rushed at him as to a refuge.  He was the sole thing in that narrow arena of dread which she did not recognize as a figure of oppression; and she floundered to her knees at his-feet and held forth the terrified child to him in an agony of appeal.  Her tormented and fearful face was upturned to him; he knew her for the Jewess, the wife of the silversmith.

“Father!” she breathed, in the pitiful idiom of that land of orphans.

“Ye-es,” said Robert Lucas vaguely, and put a hand on her head.

Never before, in all the orderly level of his life, had a human being chosen him for champion and savior.  He was aware of something within him that surged, some spate of force and potency in his blood; he stood upright with a start to confront the policeman who was on the woman’s heels.  The man was grinning still, fatuously and consciously, like a buffoon who knows he will be applauded; Lucas fronted his smiling security with a still fury that wiped the mirth from his face and left him gaping.

“Get back!” said Lucas.  He spoke in a low tone, and the crowd jostled nearer to hear.

The policeman stared at him, amazed and uncomprehending.

“Sir,” he stammered; “Excellency—­this Jewess she——­”

He stopped.  Lucas was pointing at him with the flute across the bowed head of the woman, who crouched over her child at his feet.

“You shall report the matter to the Governor,” said Lucas, in the same tone of icy anger.  “And I will report it to the Minister.”

He touched the woman.  “Get up,” he said.  “Come with me.”

He had to repeat it before she understood; she was numb with terror.  She rose with difficulty to her feet, clasping the child, whose wail was now weak with exhaustion.  The peering crowd made a ring of brute faces about them, full of menace and mystery, but the new power in him moved them to right and left at his gesture, and they gave him passage, with the woman behind him, across the road.  The stupefied policeman watched them go, and then ran off to place the matter in the hands of his superior.

Lucas was at his door when the officer whom the policeman had fetched touched him on the elbow.  He was a young man; if he had been older Lucas’s difficulties might have been increased.  He peered in the darkness, and was visible as a narrow, black-moustached face, with heavy eyebrows and a brutal mouth.  The one thing that deterred him from brisk action was the fact that Lucas was a foreigner, whose rights and liabilities were therefore uncertain.

“This woman,” he said, “is arrested.”

Lucas was unlocking the door.  He turned with his hand on the key, and the woman touched his arm.  Perhaps that touch aided him to use big words.  As a resident in Tambov he knew the officer by sight, and had always been a little daunted by his manner of power.  In Russia one comes easily to fear the police.  But now he was free of fear.