“Don’t lag, Stanley!”

At the reiteration of those words Hughs spoke.

“Let the boy alone!  You’ll be nagging at the baby next!”

Hoarse and grating, like sounds issuing from a damp vault, was this first speech.

The seamstress’s eyes brimmed over.

“I won’t get the chance,” she stammered out.  “He’s gone!”

Hughs’ teeth gleamed like those of a dog at bay.

“Who’s taken him?  You let me know the name.”

Tears rolled down the seamstress’s cheeks; she could not answer.  Her little son’s thin voice rose instead: 

“Baby’s dead.  We buried him in the ground.  I saw it.  Mr. Creed came in the cab with me.”

White flecks appeared suddenly at the corners of Hughs’ lips.  He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and once more, giraffe-like, the little family marched on....

“Westminister,” in his threadbare summer jacket—­for the day was warm—­had been standing for some little time in Mrs. Budgen’s doorway on the ground floor at Hound Street.  Knowing that Hughs was to be released that morning early, he had, with the circumspection and foresight of his character, reasoned thus:  ’I shan’t lie easy in my bed, I shan’t hev no peace until I know that low feller’s not a-goin’ to misdemean himself with me.  It’s no good to go a-puttin’ of it off.  I don’t want him comin’ to my room attackin’ of old men.  I’ll be previous with him in the passage.  The lame woman ’ll let me.  I shan’t trouble her.  She’ll be palliable between me and him, in case he goes for to attack me.  I ain’t afraid of him.’

But, as the minutes of waiting went by, his old tongue, like that of a dog expecting chastisement, appeared ever more frequently to moisten his twisted, discoloured lips.  ‘This comes of mixin’ up with soldiers,’ he thought, ‘and a lowclass o’ man like that.  I ought to ha’ changed my lodgin’s.  He’ll be askin’ me where that young girl is, I shouldn’t wonder, an’ him lost his character and his job, and everything, and all because o’ women!’

He watched the broad-faced woman, Mrs. Budgen, in whose grey eyes the fighting light so fortunately never died, painfully doing out her rooms, and propping herself against the chest of drawers whereon clustered china cups and dogs as thick as toadstools on a bank.

“I’ve told my Charlie,” she said, “to keep clear of Hughs a bit.  They comes out as prickly as hedgehogs.  Pick a quarrel as soon as look at you, they will.”

‘Oh dear,’ thought Creed, ‘she’s full o’ cold comfort.’  But, careful of his dignity, he answered, “I’m a-waitin’ here to engage the situation.  You don’t think he’ll attack of me with definition at this time in the mornin’?”

The lame woman shrugged her shoulders.  “He’ll have had a drop of something,” she said, “before he comes home.  They gets a cold feelin’ in the stomach in them places, poor creatures!”