he doing? Where would he be hanged? But this he thought he knew, and turning into the Old Bailey, he stood opposite the place.
The Old Bailey was all but deserted. Tom stood unseen, and peopled it with the vile crowd he had often read of in those newspaper descriptions which it was easy to condemn but more difficult to skip. He found himself mentally in the midst of that ruthless ritual, just as he was bodily upon its scene. He heard the lewd cheering of throats athirst for blood, the screaming of bruised and trampled women, the clink of wineglasses in the twenty-guinea windows behind and above him. On every face he found the bestial relish that the mirror had shown him at the barber’s shop. And as then he saw his own sickly mask as well, but a long way off now—above the felon’s gate—with the rope round his neck and dangling from the beam. And with that final vision returned the sense of deadly danger, in tenfold force and with sickening poignancy, as the vividness leapt from the inner to the outward eye, and he saw and realised what was then and there taking place.
A police-officer had emerged from a narrow door in the great grimy walls; his white trousers shone across the street; so did the fluttering paper in his hand. He carried a paste-pot and a brush, and stopping at a point where a black board clung to the black stones, he pasted his paper upon it. Before he began there was a little crowd about him; when he finished it stretched half across the street. And there was Tom still cowering under the windows opposite.
The first word he heard was his own name bandied from mouth to mouth.
“Herichsen,” said one. “It’s as good a name as
