more."

Later, dressed in an old Newmarket coat, given him by some client, and
walking towards the police-station alongside Mrs. Hughs, he was
particularly silent, presenting a front of some austerity, as became a
man mixed up in a low class of incident like this. And the seamstress,
very thin and scared, with her wounded wrist slung in a muffler of her
husband's, and carrying the baby on her other arm, because the morning's
incident had upset the little thing, slipped along beside him, glancing
now and then into his face.

Only once did he speak, and to himself:

"I don't know what they'll say to me down at the orffice, when I go
again-missin' my day like this! Oh dear, what a misfortune! What put it
into him to go on like that?"

At this, which was far from being intended as encouragement, the waters
of speech broke up and flowed from Mrs. Hughs. She had only told Hughs
how that young girl had gone, and left a week's rent, with a bit of
writing to say she wasn't coming back; it wasn't her fault that she was
gone--that ought never to have come there at all, a creature that knew no
better than to come between husband and wife. She couldn't tell no more
than he could where that young girl had gone!

The tears, stealing forth, chased each other down the seamstress's thin
cheeks. Her face had now but little likeness to the face with which she
had stood confronting Hughs when she informed him of the little model's
flight. None of the triumph which had leaped out of her bruised heart,
none of the strident malice with which her voice, whether she would or
no, strove to avenge her wounded sense of property; none of that
unconscious abnegation, so very near to heroism, with which she had
rushed and caught up her baby from beneath the bayonet, when, goaded by
her malice and triumph, Hughs had rushed to seize that weapon. None of
all that, but, instead, a pitiable terror of the ordeal before her--a
pitiful, mute, quivering distress, that this man, against whom, two hours
before, she had felt such a store of bitter rancour, whose almost
murderous assault she had so narrowly escaped, should now be in this
plight.

The sight of her emotion penetrated through his spectacles to something
lying deep in the old butler.

"Don't you take on," he said; "I'll stand by yer. He shan't treat yer
with impuniness."

To his uncomplicated nature the affair was still one of tit for tat. Mrs.
Hughs became mute again. Her torn hear