A message reached her from the forgotten shop during the morning, that Mr. Lawton had called to see Mr. Povey.  Already Samuel had wanted to arise, but she had forbidden it in the tone of a woman who is dangerous, and Samuel had been very reasonable.  He now said that Mr. Lawton must be asked up.  She glanced round the bedroom.  It was ‘done’; it was faultlessly correct as a sick chamber.  She agreed to the introduction into it of the man from another sphere, and after a preliminary minute she left the two to talk together.  This visit of young Lawton’s was a dramatic proof of Samuel’s importance, and of the importance of the matter in hand.  The august occasion demanded etiquette, and etiquette said that a wife should depart from her husband when he had to transact affairs beyond the grasp of a wife.

The idea of a petition to the Home Secretary took shape at this interview, and before the day was out it had spread over the town and over the Five Towns, and it was in the Signal.  The Signal spoke of Daniel Povey as ‘the condemned man.’  And the phrase startled the whole district into an indignant agitation for his reprieve.  The district woke up to the fact that a Town Councillor, a figure in the world, an honest tradesman of unspotted character, was cooped solitary in a little cell at Stafford, waiting to be hanged by the neck till he was dead.  The district determined that this must not and should not be.  Why!  Dan Povey had actually once been Chairman of the Bursley Society for the Prosecution of Felons, that association for annual eating and drinking, whose members humorously called each other ‘felons’!  Impossible, monstrous, that an ex-chairman of the ‘Felons’ should be a sentenced criminal!

However, there was nothing to fear.  No Home Secretary would dare to run counter to the jury’s recommendation and the expressed wish of the whole district.  Besides, the Home Secretary’s nephew was M.P. for the Knype division.  Of course a verdict of guilty had been inevitable.  Everybody recognized that now.  Even Samuel and all the hottest partisans of Daniel Povey recognized it.  They talked as if they had always foreseen it, directly contradicting all that they had said on only the previous day.  Without any sense of any inconsistency or of shame, they took up an absolutely new position.  The structure of blind faith had once again crumbled at the assault of realities, and unhealthy, un-English truths, the statement of which would have meant ostracism twenty-four hours earlier, became suddenly the platitudes of the Square and the market-place.

Despatch was necessary in the affair of the petition, for the condemned man had but three Sundays.  But there was delay at the beginning, because neither young Lawton nor any of his colleagues was acquainted with the proper formula of a petition to the Home Secretary for the reprieve of a criminal condemned to death.  No such petition had been made in the district within living memory.  And at first,