o saw her and who knew her now? She was innocent; she could look the
whole world in the face once more. Oh, to rub shoulders with the world
again!

A cab came tinkling up behind her, and Rachel half thought of hailing
it, and driving through the lighted town after all; but the hansom was
occupied, and the impulse passed. She put down her veil and turned into
the stream without catching a suspicious eye. Why should they suspect
her? And again, what did it matter if they did?

"Trial an' verdic'! Trial an' verdic'! Acquittal o' Mrs. Minchin! Trial
an' verdic'!"

Everybody was buying the damp, pink sheets. Rachel actually bought one
herself; and overheard the opinion of the man in the street without a
pang. So she might think herself lucky! But she did, she did; in the
reaction that had come upon her with the first mouthful of raw air, in
the intoxication of treading the outer world again, she thought herself
the luckiest woman in London, and revelled rather than otherwise in the
very considerations which had appalled her in the precincts of the
court. How good, after all, to be independent as well as free! How great
to drift with the tide of innocent women and law-abiding men, once more
one of themselves, and not even a magnet for morbid curiosity! That
would come soon enough; the present was all the more to be enjoyed; and
even the vagueness of the immediate future, even the lack of definite
plans, had a glamor of their own in eyes that were yet to have their
fill of street lamps and shop windows and omnibuses and hansom cabs.

The policeman under the bridge was a joy in himself; he refreshed
Rachel's memory as to the way, without giving her an unnecessary look;
and he called her "madam" into the bargain! After all, it was not every
policeman who had been on duty at the Old Bailey, nor one in many
thousands of the population who had gained admission to the court.

Yet if Rachel had relieved the tedium of her trial by using her eyes a
little more; if, for example, she had condescended to look twice at the
handful of mere spectators beyond the reporters on her right, she could
scarcely have failed to recognize the good-looking, elderly man who was
at her heels when she took her ticket at Blackfriars Bridge. His white
hair was covered by his hat, but the face itself was not one to be
forgotten, with its fresh color, its small, grim mouth, and the deep-set
glitter beneath the bushy eyebrows. Rachel, however, neither reco