The fate of her husband presented no mysteries to Mrs. Baines.  Everybody had been warned a thousand times of the danger of leaving the paralytic, whose life depended on his position, and whose fidgetiness was thereby a constant menace of death to him.  For five thousand nights she had wakened infallibly every time he stirred, and rearranged him by the flicker of a little oil lamp.  But Sophia, unhappy creature, had merely left him.  That was all.

Mr. Critchlow and the widow gazed, helplessly waiting, at the pitiable corpse, of which the salient part was the white beard.  They knew not that they were gazing at a vanished era.  John Baines had belonged to the past, to the age when men really did think of their souls, when orators by phrases could move crowds to fury or to pity, when no one had learnt to hurry, when Demos was only turning in his sleep, when the sole beauty of life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity, when hell really had no bottom, and a gilt-clasped Bible really was the secret of England’s greatness.  Mid-Victorian England lay on that mahogany bed.  Ideals had passed away with John Baines.  It is thus that ideals die; not in the conventional pageantry of honoured death, but sorrily, ignobly, while one’s head is turned—­

And Mr. Povey and Constance, very self-conscious, went and saw the dead elephant, and came back; and at the corner of King Street, Constance exclaimed brightly—­

“Why! who’s gone out and left the side-door open?”

For the doctor had at length arrived, and Maggie, in showing him upstairs with pious haste, had forgotten to shut the door.

And they took advantage of the side-door, rather guiltily, to avoid the eyes of the shop.  They feared that in the parlour they would be the centre of a curiosity half ironical and half reproving; for had they not accomplished an escapade?  So they walked slowly.

The real murderer was having his dinner in the commercial room up at the Tiger, opposite the Town Hall.

IV

Several shutters were put up in the windows of the shop, to indicate a death, and the news instantly became known in trading circles throughout the town.  Many people simultaneously remarked upon the coincidence that Mr. Baines should have died while there was a show of mourning goods in his establishment.  This coincidence was regarded as extremely sinister, and it was apparently felt that, for the sake of the mind’s peace, one ought not to inquire into such things too closely.  From the moment of putting up the prescribed shutters, John Baines and his funeral began to acquire importance in Bursley, and their importance grew rapidly almost from hour to hour.  The wakes continued as usual, except that the Chief Constable, upon representations being made to him by Mr. Critchlow and other citizens, descended upon St. Luke’s Square and forbade the activities of Wombwell’s orchestra.