“Yes; as though there were a fire. It seems to come from Castle Gate.”
They were both silent, listening, and leaning towards the open window. Vague, scattered cries rose from the shadowiness of the darkening town. They seemed to be drawing from Castle Gate towards the square, a low flux of sound that rose and fell like the cadence of the sea upon a shore at night.
Betty sank back in her chair with a glimmer of impatience on her face.
“Of course—I remember.”
From under the arch of the old gate-house a crowd of small boys came scattering into the far corner of the square. A number of men followed, lined along a couple of stout ropes. They were dragging a carriage over the gray cobbles and under the dark elms in the direction of Lombard Street.
Madge Ellison drew back from the window. Not so Betty. She rose from her chair, and stood looking down upon those rough men of the Roxton lanes who were shouting and waving caps with the unsophisticated and exhilarating zest of children.
The carriage with its plebeian team passed under Betty’s window. In it were a man and a woman, the woman holding a boy upon her knees.
Whether some subtle thought-wave passed between those two or not, it happened that Catherine looked up and saw the face at the open window overhead. It seemed to her in the hurly-burly of this little triumph, that the face above looked down at her out of a gloom of loneliness and humiliation. A sudden cry of womanly pity sounded in her heart. Catherine’s arms tightened unconsciously about her boy, and her eyes, that had been smiling, grew thoughtful and very sad.
The carriage rounded the corner and disappeared into Lombard Street, with a small crowd of men, women, and children following in its wake. Betty Steel turned from the window with a laugh.
“It reminds one of a political demonstration.”