sat with her ironic smile watching men judge their shadows.  She had watched them so long about that business.  With her elementary idea that hares and tortoises should not be made to start from the same mark she had a little given up expecting to be asked to come and lend a hand; they had gone so far beyond her.  Perhaps she knew, too, that men no longer punished, but now only reformed, their erring brothers, and this made her heart as light as the hearts of those who had been in the prisons where they were no longer punished.

The old butler, however, was not thinking of her; he had thoughts of a simpler order in his mind.  He was reflecting that he had once valeted the nephew of the late Lord Justice Hawthorn, and in the midst of this low-class business the reminiscence brought him refreshment.  Over and over to himself he conned these words:  “I interpylated in between them, and I says, ’You ought to be ashamed of yourself; call yourself an Englishman, I says, attackin’ of old men and women with cold steel, I says!’” And suddenly he saw that Hughs was in the dock.

The dark man stood with his hands pressed to his sides, as though at attention on parade.  A pale profile, broken by a line of black moustache, was all “Westminister” could see of that impassive face, whose eyes, fixed on the magistrate, alone betrayed the fires within.  The violent trembling of the seamstress roused in Joshua Creed a certain irritation, and seeing the baby open his black eyes, he nudged her, whispering:  “Ye’ve woke the baby!”

Responding to words, which alone perhaps could have moved her at such a moment, Mrs. Hughs rocked this dumb spectator of the drama.  Again the old butler nudged her.

“They want yer in the box,” he said.

Mrs. Hughs rose, and took her place.

He who wished to read the hearts of this husband and wife who stood at right angles, to have their wounds healed by Law, would have needed to have watched the hundred thousand hours of their wedded life, known and heard the million thoughts and words which had passed in the dim spaces of their world, to have been cognisant of the million reasons why they neither of them felt that they could have done other than they had done.  Reading their hearts by the light of knowledge such as this, he would not have been surprised that, brought into this place of remedy, they seemed to enter into a sudden league.  A look passed between them.  It was not friendly, it had no appeal; but it sufficed.  There seemed to be expressed in it the knowledge bred by immemorial experience and immemorial time:  This law before which we stand was not made by us!  As dogs, when they hear the crack of a far whip, will shrink, and in their whole bearing show wary quietude, so Hughs and Mrs. Hughs, confronted by the questionings of Law, made only such answers as could be dragged from them.  In a voice hardly above a whisper Mrs. Hughs told her tale.  They had fallen out.  What about?