dark brown eyes were more alive than she had ever seen them. A stranger
stepped out of the inn and laughed so heartily that he had to loose his
neckerchief. Of course she must look funny, walking bareheaded, with
earth and blood caking her hair, and her skin sweating and yellow with
nausea and her burdened body, her face grimacing with anguish every
time Ned Turk danced in front of her and beat the tin can in her ears.

"Oh, my baby, my baby!" she moaned. Ned Turk heard the cry and repeated
it, screaming comically, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" All the crowd took it
up, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" She shut her ears with her hands, and wished
that wherever Harry was, he might fall dead for having left her and his
child to this.

Then from the porch of the cottage at the angle of the High Street and
the Thudersley Road, the cottage where Cliffe, the blind man, lived with
his pretty wife, there stepped out Peacey. For a moment he shrank back
into the shadow, holding a handkerchief in front of his face, but she
had recognised the tall, full body that was compact and yet had no
solidity, that suggested a lot of thick fleshy material rolled in itself
like an umbrella. It was her last humiliation that he should see this
thing happening to her. She lifted her chin and tried to walk proudly.
But he had come forward out into the roadway and was coming towards her
and her followers. He did not seem quite aware of what he was
approaching. He walked delicately on the balls of his large and light
feet, almost as though the occasion was joyful; and he held his face
obliquely and with an air of attention, as if he waited at some
invisible table. There hung about him that threatening serial quality
which made it seem that in his heart he was ridiculing those who tried
to understand his actions before he disclosed their meaning in some
remote last chapter. It struck her, even in the midst of her agony, that
she disliked him even more than she disliked what was happening to her.

She had thought that he would smile gloatingly into her sweaty face and
pass on. But she saw swimming before her a fat, outstretched hand, and
behind it a stout blackness of broadcloth, and heard her pursuers halt
and cease the beating of their tin cans, and came to a swaying
standstill, while above her there boomed, gently and persuasively,
Peacey's rich voice. She could not pin her fluttering mind to what it
said, because she felt sickish at the oil of service, the gre