“No! you don’t!” I says to him, with a look as black as thunder. “You don’t lay a finger on that gal or I’ll smash you! You’ve got the best of it this time, my beauty, but I’ll convict you before I’ve done with you, or my name’s not Charles Challice.” (And I kept my word, too, for not three months after I had the good luck to get him seven years’ penal servitude, for breaking into the house of an unprotected old lady and stealing all her plate.)
Well, I had Nan carried into one of the court rooms, and when she had had a glass of cold water and could tell me her address, I took her home. She didn’t speak one word to me all the way, but when I had put her down at her place (and a poor place it was), “Officer,” she says, crying, “shall I ever see him again?”
“See him again?” I replied, trying to speak cheerful, “in course you will! What’s to prevent it?”
“But how long will they keep him in that horrid place and when he’s as innocent as I am? My poor, poor Nick!”
“Oh! the gaol ain’t a horrid place by no means, my dear. It’s as comfortable as it can be, and Nick will have everything he can want whilst there.”
“But the disgrace, the shame,” she murmured, “it will kill him! And when will the trial take place?”
“Very soon. P’r’aps in a few days,” I answered her, for the autumn sessions was on, and I knew we had very few cases. “And now you must give up work for a bit, my dear, and wait patiently here till you know the verdict.”
“Give up work!” she repeated. “Oh, no! how can I? It is all I have to depend upon now Nick is away.”
So day after day I used to watch the poor darling, dragging her way up to the baker’s shop, and it seemed to me as if she grew thinner and darker, and her eyes more hollow each time I saw her.
I used to say a few words of comfort to her as she passed, but I knew it wasn’t the time to tell her of my love, for all her mind was wrapped up in Nick.