"Did he sack you, Tip?" called Joe.
"Yes, he did," came the quivering old voice. "Turned us off at a day. Told us to go to the Bastille; and said he'd put the police on us."
The tremulous old voice made people turn their heads. They saw the strange figure lifted above them. Some tittered. The ripple of titters enraged the men at the back of the hall.
"See what you've made of him!" thundered Joe. "And then jeer! ... Shame!"
"Shame!" screamed a bitter man. "Do the Fats know shame?"
"Some of em do," said a quiet voice.
It was true too. Mrs. Trupp was looking pale and miserable in the front-row, so was the Colonel on the platform, Bobby Chislehurst and others. The titterers, indeed, howled into silence by the storm of indignation their action had aroused, wore themselves the accusing air of those who hope thereby to fix the blame for their mistake on others.
In the silence a baggy old gentleman rose in the body of the hall, slewed round with difficulty, and mooned above his spectacles at the strange idol seated on men's shoulders behind him.
"And He was lifted up," he said in a musing voice more to himself than to anybody else.
The phrase, audible to many, seemed to spread a silence about it as a stone dropped in a calm pond creates an ever-broadening ripple.