t yearned to cancel the penalty
that would fall on all of them, to deliver Hughs from the common
enemy--the Law; but a queer feeling of pride and bewilderment, and a
knowledge, that, to demand an eye for an eye was expected of all
self-respecting persons, kept her silent.

Thus, then, they reached the great consoler, the grey resolver of all
human tangles, haven of men and angels, the police court. It was
situated in a back street. Like trails of ooze, when the tide, neither
ebb nor flow, is leaving and making for some estuary, trails of human
beings were moving to and from it. The faces of these shuffling
"shadows" wore a look as though masked with some hard but threadbare
stuff-the look of those whom Life has squeezed into a last resort.
Within the porches lay a stagnant marsh of suppliants, through whose
centre trickled to and fro that stream of ooze. An old policeman, too,
like some grey lighthouse, marked the entrance to the port of refuge.
Close to that lighthouse the old butler edged his way. The love of
regularity, and of an established order of affairs, born in him and
fostered by a life passed in the service of the "Honorable Bateson" and
the other gentry, made him cling instinctively to the only person in this
crowd whom he could tell for certain to be on the side of law and order.
Something in his oblong face and lank, scanty hair parted precisely in
the middle, something in that high collar supporting his lean gills, not
subservient exactly, but as it were suggesting that he was in league
against all this low-class of fellow, made the policeman say to him:

"What's your business, daddy?"

"Oh!" the old butler answered. "This poor woman. I'm a witness to her
battery."

The policeman cast his not unkindly look over the figure of the
seamstress. "You stand here," he said; "I'll pass you in directly."

And soon by his offices the two were passed into the port of refuge.

They sat down side by side on the edge of a long, hard, wooden bench;
Creed fixing his eyes, whose colour had run into a brownish rim round
their centres, on the magistrate, as in old days sun-worshippers would
sit blinking devoutly at the sun; and Mrs. Hughs fixing her eyes on her
lap, while tears of agony trickled down her face. On her unwounded arm
the baby slept. In front of them, and unregarded, filed one by one those
shadows who had drunk the day before too deeply of the waters of
forgetfulness. To-day, instead, they were