cold and calculated outburst on the right of every man
to be assumed innocent except on overwhelming evidence such as did not
here exist. The cold and calculated balancing of pro and con; and those
minutes of cold calculation veiled from the eyes of the court. Even the
verdict: 'Guilty'; even the judgment: 'Three years' penal servitude.'
All nothing, all superfluity to the boy supporting the tragic gaze of
Tryst's eyes and making up his mind to a desperate resort.

"Three years' penal servitude!" The big laborer paid no more attention
to those words than to any others spoken during that hour's settlement of
his fate. True, he received them standing, as is the custom, fronting
the image of Justice, from whose lips they came. But by no single
gesture did he let any one see the dumb depths of his soul. If life had
taught him nothing else, it had taught him never to express himself.
Mute as any bullock led into the slaughtering-house, with something of a
bullock's dulled and helpless fear in his eyes, he passed down and away
between his jailers. And at once the professional noises rose, and the
professional rhapsodists, hunching their gowns, swept that little lot of
papers into their pink tape, and, turning to their neighbors, smiled, and
talked, and jerked their eyebrows.

CHAPTER XXXIV

The nest on the Spaniard's Road had not been able to contain Sheila long.
There are certain natures, such as that of Felix, to whom the claims and
exercise of authority are abhorrent, who refuse to exercise it themselves
and rage when they see it exercised over others, but who somehow never
come into actual conflict with it. There are other natures, such as
Sheila's, who do not mind in the least exercising authority themselves,
but who oppose it vigorously when they feel it coming near themselves or
some others. Of such is the kingdom of militancy. Her experience with
the police had sunk deep into her soul. They had not, as a fact, treated
her at all badly, which did not prevent her feeling as if they had
outraged in her the dignity of woman. She arrived, therefore, in
Hampstead seeing red even where red was not. And since, undoubtedly,
much real red was to be seen, there was little other color in the world
or in her cheeks those days. Long disagreements with Alan, to whom she
was still a magnet but whose Stanley-like nature stood firm against the
blandishments of her revolting tongue, drove her more and more toward a