He moved away.

All Samuel’s flesh tingled as a heavy wave of emotion rolled through his being.  It was just as if some one had dealt him a blow unimaginably tremendous.  His heart shivered, as a ship shivers at the mountainous crash of the waters.  He was numbed.  He wanted to weep, to vomit, to die, to sink away.  But a voice was whispering to him:  “You will have to go through with this.  You are in charge of this.”  He thought of his wife and child, innocently asleep in the cleanly pureness of his home.  And he felt the roughness of his coat-collar round his neck and the insecurity of his trousers.  He passed out of the room, shutting the door.  And across the yard he had a momentary glimpse of those nude nocturnal forms, unconsciously attitudinizing in the bakehouse.  And down the stairs came the protests of Dick, driven by pain into a monotonous silly blasphemy.

“I’ll fetch Harrop,” he said, melancholily, to his cousin.

The doctor’s house was less than fifty yards off, and the doctor had a night-bell, which, though he was a much older man than his father had been at his age, he still answered promptly.  No need to bombard the doctor’s premises with Indian corn!  While Samuel was parleying with the doctor through a window, the question ran incessantly through his mind:  “What about telling the police?”

But when, in advance of old Harrop, he returned to Daniel’s shop, lo! the policeman previously encountered had returned upon his beat, and Daniel was talking to him in the little doorway.  No other soul was about.  Down King Street, along Wedgwood Street, up the Square, towards Brougham Street, nothing but gaslamps burning with their everlasting patience, and the blind facades of shops.  Only in the second storey of the Bank Building at the top of the Square a light showed mysteriously through a blind.  Somebody ill there!

The policeman was in a high state of nervous excitement.  That had happened to him which had never happened to him before.  Of the sixty policemen in Bursley, just he had been chosen by fate to fit the socket of destiny.  He was startled.

“What’s this, what’s this, Mr. Povey?” he turned hastily to Samuel.  “What’s this as Mr. Councillor Povey is a-telling me?”

“You come in, sergeant,” said Daniel.

“If I come in,” said the policeman to Samuel, “you mun’ go along Wedgwood Street, Mr. Povey, and bring my mate.  He should be on Duck Bank, by rights.”

It was astonishing, when once the stone had begun to roll, how quickly it ran.  In half an hour Samuel had actually parted from Daniel at the police-office behind the Shambles, and was hurrying to rouse his wife so that she could look after Dick Povey until he might be taken off to Pirehill Infirmary, as old Harrop had instantly, on seeing him, decreed.