He would have hindered her, but the manhood in him had neither the power nor the pride. She swept out and left him. He heard the sound of sobbing as she climbed the stairs.
“Good God—!”
Parker Steel stood listening, staring at the door, a man who could neither think nor act.
CHAPTER XXXVII
On two successive days the society of loafers that lounged outside the gates of Roxton station for the ostensible purpose of carrying hand-bags and parcels, had noticed Major Murray’s red-wheeled dog-cart meet the afternoon express from town. The society of luggage loafers boasted a membership of four. It was not an energetic brotherhood, and had put up a living protest against the unseemly scurry and bustle of twentieth-century methods. The society’s loafing ground ran along the white fence that closed in the “goods” yard, a fence that carried, from four distinct patches of discoloration, the marks left by the brothers’ bodies in their postures of dignified and independent ease.
All the comings and goings of Roxton seemed known to these four gentlemen, whose eyes were ever on the alert, though their hands remained in their trousers-pockets. A fly basking on the sidewalk within six feet would be seen and dislodged by a brisk discharge of saliva from between one of the member’s lips. Like Diogenes, they “had reduced impertinence to a fine art”; and the major portion of the society’s funds was patriotically disbursed to swell the state’s revenue on beer.
“Psst—’Ere ’e is ag’in.”
“’oo?”
A mouth was wiped by the back of a hand.
“Murray’s man.”