h nothing that was said. But now and again
there was laughter. It was the laughter that held him gazing and
apprehensive; it had a harsher note than mirth. It seemed to him,
too, that some of the men in the doorway were in uniform; he could
see them only in outline, mere black silhouettes against the interior
lights; but there was about them the ominous cut of the official,
that Russian bird of ill-omen. And then, while yet he doubted, there
sounded the very keynote of disaster. From somewhere within the
silversmith's shop a woman screamed, sudden and startling.

"Now, now!" said Robert Lucas, at his window, grasping his flute
nervously. And, as though in answer to his remonstrance, there was
again that guttural, animal laughter. He frowned.

"I must see into this," he told himself very seriously.

He turned from the window. His pleasant room, with the bright lamp on
the table and the music leaning beside it, seemed to advise him to
proceed with caution. He and his life were not devised for situations
in which women screamed on that tense note of anguish and terror; he
had never done a violent thing in all his days. There was no clear
purpose in his mind as he pulled open his door to go out--merely an
ill-ease that forced him to go nearer to the cause of those screams.
He had descended the stairs and was fumbling at the latch of the
street-door before he realized that he was still holding the flute.

"Oh, bother!" he exclaimed, in extreme exasperation when the
instrument proved too long for his pocket, and went out carrying it
like some remarkable and ornate baton.

The small crowd before the silversmith's shop numbered, perhaps, a
hundred people, and even before his eyes were acclimatized to the
darkness he smelt sheepskin coats and tan-bark. He touched one big
man on the arm and asked a question. The lights in the shop lit up
the fellow's hairy face and loose grin as he turned to answer.

"Eh?" said the man. "Why, it's a Jew that the police are clearing
out. Did you hear the Jewess squeal?"

"Yes, I heard," said Lucas, and moved away.

He was cut off from the door of the shop by the backs of the crowd,
and passed along the street to get round them. Inside the lighted
house the baby had begun to cry, but there was no more screaming. He
had a sense that unless he hurried he might be too late for what was
in preparation. The crowd seemed to be waiting for some culminating
scene, with more than screams in it. A t