Hughs dropped his arm.  His short, dark face had a desperate look, as of a caged rat; his eyes were everywhere at once.

“All right, daddy,” he said; “I won’t hurt you.  She’s drove my head all wrong again.  Catch hold o’ this; I can’t trust myself.”  He held out the bayonet.

“Westminister” took it gingerly in his shaking hand.

“To use a thing like that!” he said.  “An’ call yourself an Englishman!  I’ll ketch me death standin’ here, I will.”

Hughs made no answer leaning against the wall.  The old butler regarded him severely.  He did not take a wide or philosophic view of him, as a tortured human being, driven by the whips of passion in his dark blood; a creature whose moral nature was the warped, stunted tree his life had made it; a poor devil half destroyed by drink and by his wound.  The old butler took a more single-minded and old-fashioned line.  ’Ketch ’old of ‘im!’ he thought.  ‘With these low fellers there’s nothin’ else to be done.  Ketch ’old of ‘im until he squeals.’

Nodding his ancient head, he said: 

“Here’s an orficer.  I shan’t speak for yer; you deserves all you’ll get, and more.”

Later, dressed in an old Newmarket coat, given him by some client, and walking towards the police-station alongside Mrs. Hughs, he was particularly silent, presenting a front of some austerity, as became a man mixed up in a low class of incident like this.  And the seamstress, very thin and scared, with her wounded wrist slung in a muffler of her husband’s, and carrying the baby on her other arm, because the morning’s incident had upset the little thing, slipped along beside him, glancing now and then into his face.

Only once did he speak, and to himself: 

“I don’t know what they’ll say to me down at the orffice, when I go again-missin’ my day like this!  Oh dear, what a misfortune!  What put it into him to go on like that?”

At this, which was far from being intended as encouragement, the waters of speech broke up and flowed from Mrs. Hughs.  She had only told Hughs how that young girl had gone, and left a week’s rent, with a bit of writing to say she wasn’t coming back; it wasn’t her fault that she was gone—­that ought never to have come there at all, a creature that knew no better than to come between husband and wife.  She couldn’t tell no more than he could where that young girl had gone!

The tears, stealing forth, chased each other down the seamstress’s thin cheeks.  Her face had now but little likeness to the face with which she had stood confronting Hughs when she informed him of the little model’s flight.  None of the triumph which had leaped out of her bruised heart, none of the strident malice with which her voice, whether she would or no, strove to avenge her wounded sense of property; none of that unconscious abnegation, so very near to heroism, with which she had rushed and caught up her baby from beneath the bayonet, when, goaded by her malice and triumph, Hughs had rushed to seize that weapon.  None of all that, but, instead, a pitiable terror of the ordeal before her—­a pitiful, mute, quivering distress, that this man, against whom, two hours before, she had felt such a store of bitter rancour, whose almost murderous assault she had so narrowly escaped, should now be in this plight.