ead the advancing footsteps of the Law, Creed said: "You attack me if
you dare!"

Hughs dropped his arm. His short, dark face had a desperate look, as of
a caged rat; his eyes were everywhere at once.

"All right, daddy," he said; "I won't hurt you. She's drove my head all
wrong again. Catch hold o' this; I can't trust myself." He held out the
bayonet.

"Westminister" took it gingerly in his shaking hand.

"To use a thing like that!" he said. "An' call yourself an Englishman!
I'll ketch me death standin' here, I will."

Hughs made no answer leaning against the wall. The old butler regarded
him severely. He did not take a wide or philosophic view of him, as a
tortured human being, driven by the whips of passion in his dark blood;
a creature whose moral nature was the warped, stunted tree his life had
made it; a poor devil half destroyed by drink and by his wound. The old
butler took a more single-minded and old-fashioned line. 'Ketch 'old
of 'im!' he thought. 'With these low fellers there's nothin' else to be
done. Ketch 'old of 'im until he squeals.'

Nodding his ancient head, he said:

"Here's an orficer. I shan't speak for yer; you deserves all you'll get,
and more."

Later, dressed in an old Newmarket coat, given him by some client,
and walking towards the police-station alongside Mrs. Hughs, he was
particularly silent, presenting a front of some austerity, as became a
man mixed up in a low class of incident like this. And the seamstress,
very thin and scared, with her wounded wrist slung in a muffler of her
husband's, and carrying the baby on her other arm, because the morning's
incident had upset the little thing, slipped along beside him, glancing
now and then into his face.

Only once did he speak, and to himself:

"I don't know what they'll say to me down at the orffice, when I go
again-missin' my day like this! Oh dear, what a misfortune! What put it
into him to go on like that?"

At this, which was far from being intended as encouragement, the waters
of speech broke up and flowed from Mrs. Hughs. She had only told Hughs
how that young girl had gone, and left a week's rent, with a bit of
writing to say she wasn't coming back; it wasn't her fault that she was
gone--that ought never to have come there at all, a creature that knew
no better than to come between husband and wife. She couldn't tell no
more than he could where that young girl had gone!

The tears, stealing forth, chased each other down