I was, then, free—­free of the injunction of that piece of paper reposing in my pocket.  Yet its influence was still upon me.  I did not hurry away, but lingered in the courts, fascinated by the notion that the fate of each prisoner had first passed through my hands.  At last I made an effort, and went out into the corridor.  There I passed a woman whose figure seemed familiar.  She was sitting with her hands in her lap looking straight before her, pale-faced and not uncomely, with thickish mouth and nose—­the woman whose bill we had thrown out.  Why was she sitting there?  Had she not then realised that we had quashed her claim; or was she, like myself, kept here by mere attraction of the Law?  Following I know not what impulse, I said:  “Your case was dismissed, wasn’t it?” She looked up at me stolidly, and a tear, which had evidently been long gathering, dropped at the movement.  “I do nod know; I waid to see,” she said in her thick voice; “I tink there has been mistake.”  My face, no doubt, betrayed something of my sentiments about her case, for the thick tears began rolling fast down her pasty cheeks, and her pent-up feeling suddenly flowed forth in words:  “I work ’ard; Gott! how I work hard!  And there gomes dis liddle beastly man, and rob me.  And they say:  ‘Ah! yes; but you are a bad woman, we don’ trust you—­you speak lie.’  But I speak druth, I am nod a bad woman—­I gome from Hamburg.”  “Yes, yes,” I murmured; “yes, yes.”  “I do not know this country well, sir.  I speak bad English.  Is that why they do not drust my word?” She was silent for a moment, searching my face, then broke out again:  “It is all ’ard work in my profession, I make very liddle, I cannot afford to be rob.  Without the men I cannod make my living, I must drust them—­and they rob me like this, it is too ’ard.”  And the slow tears rolled faster and faster from her eyes on to her hands and her black lap.  Then quietly, and looking for a moment singularly like a big, unhappy child, she asked:  “Will you blease dell me, sir, why they will not give me the law of that dirty little man?”

I knew—­and too well; but I could not tell her.

“You see,” I said, “it’s just a case of your word against his.”  “Oh! no; but,” she said eagerly, “he give me the note—­I would not have taken it if I ’ad not thought it good, would I?  That is sure, isn’t it?  But five pounds it is not my price.  It must that I give ’im change!  Those gentlemen that heard my case, they are men of business, they must know that it is not my price.  If I could tell the judge—­I think he is a man of business too he would know that too, for sure.  I am not so young.  I am not so veree beautiful as all that; he must see, mustn’t he, sir?”

At my wits’ end how to answer that most strange question, I stammered out:  “But, you know, your profession is outside the law.”