ness had toppled it down
thence, and brought it to ruin. She could never speak to him, never know
him again till it was re-established. Still his letters galled her. He
assumed, she supposed, that such a thing could happen, and nothing more
be said about it? How little he knew her, or what she had in her mind!

Now, as she walked along, wrapped in her plaid cape, her thought was one
long tumultuous succession of painful or passionate images, interrupted
none the less at times by those curious self-observing pauses of which
she had always been capable. She had been sitting for hours beside Mrs.
Hurd, with little Willie upon her knees. The mother, always anaemic and
consumptive, was by now prostrate, the prey of a long-drawn agony,
peopled by visions of Jim alone and in prison--Jim on the scaffold with
the white cap over his eyes--Jim in the prison coffin--which would rouse
her shrieking from dreams which were the rending asunder of soul and
body. Minta Hurd's love for the unhappy being who had brought her to
this pass had been infinitely maternal. There had been a boundless pity
in it, and the secret pride of a soul, which, humble and modest towards
all the rest of the world, yet knew itself to be the breath and
sustenance, the indispensable aid of one other soul in the universe, and
gloried accordingly. To be cut off now from all ministration, all
comforting--to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when
the neighbours should come in and say, "It is all over--they have broken
his neck--and buried him"--it was a doom beyond all even that her timid
pessimist heart had ever dreamed. She had already seen him twice in
prison, and she knew that she would see him again. She was to go on
Monday, Miss Boyce said, before the trial began, and after--if they
brought him in guilty--they would let her say good-bye. She was always
thirsting to see him. But when she went, the prison surroundings
paralysed her. Both she and Hurd felt themselves caught in the wheels of
a great relentless machine, of which the workings filled them with a
voiceless terror. He talked to her spasmodically of the most incongruous
things--breaking out sometimes with a glittering eye into a string of
instances bearing on Westall's bullying and tyrannous ways. He told her
to return the books Miss Boyce had lent him, but when asked if he would
like to see Marcella he shrank and said no. Mr. Wharton was "doin'
capital" for him; but she wasn't to count