CHAPTER I
"Robert Champion, you are sentenced to twelve months' hard labour."
As the chairman of the Sessions Court pronounced the words, the prisoner turned right round in the dock, and glanced towards where he knew his wife was standing. He caught her eye, and smiled. What meaning, if any, the smile conveyed, he perhaps knew. She could only guess. It was possibly intended to be a more careless, a more light-hearted smile than it in reality appeared. Robert Champion had probably not such complete control over his facial muscles as he would have desired. There was a hunted, anxious look about the eyes, a suggestion of uncomfortable pallor about the whole countenance which rather detracted from the impression which she had no doubt that he had intended to make. She knew the man well enough to be aware that nothing would please him better than that she should suppose that he regarded the whole proceedings with gay bravado, with complete indifference, both for the powers that were and for the punishment which they had meted out to him. But even if the expression on his face had not shown that the cur in the man had, for the moment, the upper hand, the unceremonious fashion in which the warders bundled him down the staircase, and out of sight, would have been sufficient to prevent any impression being left behind that he had departed from the scene in a halo of dignity.
As regards his wife, the effect made upon her by the whole proceedings was an overwhelming consciousness of unbearable shame. When the man with the cheap good looks was hustled away, as if he were some inferior thing, the realisation that this was indeed her husband, was more than she could endure. She reached out with her hand, as if in search of some support, and, finding none, sank to the floor of the court in a swoon.
"Poor dear!" said a woman, standing near."I expect she's something to do with that scamp of a fellow--maybe she's his wife."
"This sort of thing often is hardest on those who are left behind," chimed in a man."Sometimes it isn't those who are in prison who suffer most; it's those who are outside."
When, having regained some of her senses, Violet Champion found herself in the street, she was inclined to call herself hard names for having gone near the court at all. She had only gone because she feared that if she stayed away she might not have learned how the thing had ended. This crime of which Robert Champion had been guilty was such a petty, such a paltry thing, that, so far as she knew, the earlier stages of the case had not been reported at all. One or other of the few score journals which London issues might have noticed it at some time, somewhere. If so, it had escaped her observati
