The police station was round the corner of the next street, some fifty yards distant. The woman’s hansom had been there quite a minute by the time the four-wheeled cab appeared at the rate of three miles an hour.
The woman had deemed it expedient to remain in the hansom until its arrival. The absence of excited onlookers at the door of the police station had been a disappointment to her. It had seemed to be an error of judgment to arrive before the police. And by a curious oversight she had neglected to have a police constable riding in the hansom with her. However, with the consummate generalship gained by a long intercourse with public life she was able to repair this omission. She stood up in the hansom, and after catching the eye of several of the passers-by, called out to no one in particular in her most vibrant mass-meeting accents, “Let the prisoner get out first.”
The portly police constable got down from the box of the four-wheeler with an alacrity which a detached observer might have felt to be beneath the dignity of his physical equipment, and communicated this order to those who sat within. It reassured the woman to observe that the door of the police station had opened, and that on its threshold were a police constable and a pale man with a pen behind his ear. A second crowd was beginning already to assemble. As the boy in the grasp of his two custodians was marched into the police station, the woman had the gratification of noticing that by this time a number of eye-witnesses had come round the corner from the Emporium. Their interest was reassuring.
By the time the crowd on the pavement had grown almost large enough to warrant the woman’s descent from the hansom, another pale man, with a pen behind both ears, came out of the police station. The crowd made way for him respectfully. He approached the step of the hansom with the finely considered deportment of one who is accustomed to deal with men and things.
“I am afraid, Lady Pomeroy,” he said firmly, but with perfect courtesy, “we shall have to trouble you to come in and prefer a charge.”
“I have nothing whatever to do with the charges,” said the woman, speaking over his head to the crowd. “I ask for my purse; I can’t live without it. If it is not returned to me immediately it will give great displeasure to Lord Pomeroy.”
However, by this time the woman had seemed fully to decide that the hour was ripe to make a descent from the vehicle. As she did so one of those who had been privileged to take part in the scene outside the Emporium cried, “Three cheers for Lord Pomeroy!”
They were given heartily.
By an impulse which she was powerless to repress, the woman stopped in her triumphal progress to the door of the police station, and bowed and smiled gracefully on all sides.
“Three cheers for the Countess!” was the reward she received.