Gwynplaine
walked, arrived at the small streets, Ursus watched them breathlessly.
There are moments in which a man's whole being passes into his eyes.

Which way were they going to turn?

They turned to the right.

Ursus, staggering with terror, leant against a wall that he might not
fall.

There is no hypocrisy so great as the words which we say to ourselves,
"_I wish to know the worst_!" At heart we do not wish it at all. We have
a dreadful fear of knowing it. Agony is mingled with a dim effort not to
see the end. We do not own it to ourselves, but we would draw back if we
dared; and when we have advanced, we reproach ourselves for having done
so.

Thus did Ursus. He shuddered as he thought,--

"Here are things going wrong. I should have found it out soon enough.
What business had I to follow Gwynplaine?"

Having made this reflection, man being but self-contradiction, he
increased his pace, and, mastering his anxiety, hastened to get nearer
the _cortege_, so as not to break, in the maze of small streets, the
thread between Gwynplaine and himself.

The _cortege_ of police could not move quickly, on account of its
solemnity.

The wapentake led it.

The justice of the quorum closed it.

This order compelled a certain deliberation of movement.

All the majesty possible in an official shone in the justice of the
quorum. His costume held a middle place between the splendid robe of a
doctor of music of Oxford and the sober black habiliments of a doctor of
divinity of Cambridge. He wore the dress of a gentleman under a long
_godebert_, which is a mantle trimmed with the fur of the Norwegian
hare. He was half Gothic and half modern, wearing a wig like Lamoignon,
and sleeves like Tristan l'Hermite. His great round eye watched
Gwynplaine with the fixedness of an owl's.

He walked with a cadence. Never did honest man look fiercer.

Ursus, for a moment thrown out of his way in the tangled skein of
streets, overtook, close to Saint Mary Overy, the _cortege_, which had
fortunately been retarded in the churchyard by a fight between children
and dogs--a common incident in the streets in those days. "_Dogs and
boys_," say the old registers of police, placing the dogs before the
boys.

A man being taken before a magistrate by the police was, after all, an
everyday affair, and each one having his own business to attend to, the
few who had followed soon dispersed. There remained but Ursus on the
track of Gwynplaine.