ether evil, that men should stand amazed. She was coming over him
now; he knew by the alteration of the very air of the room when she was
near him; and that soft thrill of bliss that had begun to stir in him
never came unless she was beckoning, beckoning....

He let go the wall and fell back into bed again as--oh, unthinkable!--the
other half of that kiss that a gnash had interrupted was placed (how else
convey it?) on his lips, robbing him of very breath....

XII

In the bright June sunlight a crowd filled the square, and looked up at
the windows of the old house with the antique insurance marks in its
walls of red brick and the agents' notice-boards hanging like wooden
choppers over the paling. Two constables stood at the broken gate of the
narrow entrance-alley, keeping folk back. The women kept to the outskirts
of the throng, moving now and then as if to see the drawn red blinds of
the old house from a new angle, and talking in whispers. The children
were in the houses, behind closed doors.

A long-nosed man had a little group about him, and he was telling some
story over and over again; and another man, little and fat and wide-eyed,
sought to capture the long-nosed man's audience with some relation in
which a key figured.

"... and it was revealed to me that there'd been something that very
afternoon," the long-nosed man was saying. "I was standing there, where
Constable Saunders is--or rather, I was passing about my business, when
they came out. There was no deceiving me, oh, no deceiving _me! I_ saw
her face...."

"What was it like, Mr. Barrett?" a man asked.

"It was like hers whom our Lord said to, 'Woman, doth any man accuse
thee?'--white as paper, and no mistake! Don't tell _me_!... And so I
walks straight across to Mrs. Barrett, and 'Jane,' I says, 'this must
stop, and stop at once; we are commanded to avoid evil,' I says, 'and it
must come to an end now; let him get help elsewhere.'

"And she says to me, 'John,' she says, 'it's four-and-sixpence a
week'--them was her words.

"'Jane,' I says, 'if it was forty-six thousand pounds it should
stop'... and from that day to this she hasn't set foot inside that gate."

There was a short silence: then,

"Did Mrs. Barrett ever..._ see_ anythink, like?" somebody vaguely
inquired.

Barrett turned austerely on the speaker.

"What Mrs. Barrett saw and Mrs. Barrett didn't see shall not pass these
lips; even as it is written, keep thy tongue from speaking