In the great bar of the Vaults a barman was craning over the pitchpine screen that secured privacy to drinkers.  The procession continued without break, eternally rising over the verge of King Street ‘bank,’ and eternally vanishing round the corner into St. Luke’s Square; at intervals it was punctuated by a clergyman, a Nonconformist minister, a town crier, a group of foremen, or a few Rifle Volunteers.  The watching crowd grew as the procession lengthened.  Then another band was heard, also playing the march from Saul.  The first band had now reached the top of the Square, and was scarcely audible from King Street.  The reiterated glitter in the sun of memorial cards in hats gave the fanciful illusion of an impossible whitish snake that was straggling across the town.  Three-quarters of an hour elapsed before the tail of the snake came into view, and a rabble of unkempt boys closed in upon it, filling the street,

“I shall go to the drawing-room window, mother,” said Cyril.

She nodded.  He crept out of the bedroom.

St. Luke’s Square was a sea of hats and memorial cards.  Most of the occupiers of the Square had hung out flags at half-mast, and a flag at half-mast was flying over the Town Hall in the distance.  Sightseers were at every window.  The two bands had united at the top of the Square; and behind them, on a North Staffordshire Railway lorry, stood the white-clad Rector and several black figures.  The Rector was speaking; but only those close to the lorry could hear his feeble treble voice.

Such was the massive protest of Bursley against what Bursley regarded as a callous injustice.  The execution of Daniel Povey had most genuinely excited the indignation of the town.  That execution was not only an injustice; it was an insult, a humiliating snub.  And the worst was that the rest of the country had really discovered no sympathetic interest in the affair.  Certain London papers, indeed, in commenting casually on the execution, had slurred the morals and manners of the Five Towns, professing to regard the district as notoriously beyond the realm of the Ten Commandments.  This had helped to render furious the townsmen.  This, as much as anything, had encouraged the spontaneous outburst of feeling which had culminated in a St. Luke’s Square full of people with memorial cards in their hats.  The demonstration had scarcely been organized; it had somehow organized itself, employing the places of worship and a few clubs as centres of gathering.  And it proved an immense success.  There were seven or eight thousand people in the Square, and the pity was that England as a whole could not have had a glimpse of the spectacle.  Since the execution of the elephant, nothing had so profoundly agitated Bursley.  Constance, who left the bedroom momentarily for the drawing-room, reflected that the death and burial of Cyril’s honoured grandfather, though a resounding event, had not caused one-tenth of the stir which she beheld.  But then John Baines had killed nobody.