He saw the officer hesitate frowningly, and quaked.  In a moment the man might make up his mind and seize him; there was an urgent necessity for some action that should quell him.  Like all weak men, he saw a resource in violence, and as the officer opened his lips to speak again he interrupted.

“No more!” he shouted.  “You have heard what I had to say; that is enough.  Now go!”

He pointed frantically with his flute, and the officer, at the sudden lifting of his arm, made a surprised movement, which Lucas misunderstood.

With a cry that was half terror and half ecstasy he smote, and the flute beat the officer’s cap down over his eyes.

“Yei Bohu!” ejaculated the officer, falling back,

Lucas did not wait for him to thrust the cap away and recover himself.  He had done his utmost, and the next step must rest with Providence.  It was but two paces to the doorway.  The officer was not quick enough to see his panic-stricken retirement.  He recovered his sight only to see the slam of the door, which seemed to close in his face with a contemptuous and defiant emphasis.  It was like a final fist shaken at him to drive home a warning.  He shook his head despondently.

On the other side of the door Lucas, fighting with his loud breath, heard his slow footsteps on the cobbles as he departed.  He waited, hardly daring to relax his mind to hope, till he heard the party of them drawing off.  He was weak with unaccustomed emotions.

What struck him as marvelous was that the woman, whose face he had last seen as a writhen mask of fear, should appear in the light of his room with her calm restored, with nothing but some disorder of her hair and dress to betoken her troubles.  Even the child in her arms, worn out with weeping perhaps, had fallen asleep.  He stared at the pair of them vacantly.  His lamp, his music, all the apparatus of his gentle and decorous existence were as he had left them; their familiar and prosaic quality made his adventure appear by contrast monstrous.

The Jewess was watching him.  In her dark, serious way she had a certain striking beauty.  Her grave eyes waited for him to look at her.

“What is it?” he said at last.

“If I might put the child down,” she suggested timidly.

Lucas pointed to the double-doors of his bedroom.  “My bed is in there,” he answered.  She lowered her head, as though in obedience to a command he had given, and carried the child out.  Lucas watched her go, and then crossed the room to a cupboard which contained, among other things, a bottle of brandy.

While he was drinking she returned, pausing in the door to look back at the child.  He noticed that she left the door partly open to hear it if it should wake, and somehow this struck him as particularly moving.

She came across the room to him, with her steadfast eyes on his face, and, without speaking, fell on her knees before him and put the edge of his coat to her lips.