Again the old butler nudged her.
"They want yer in the box," he said.
Mrs.Hughs rose, and took her place.
He who wished to read the hearts of this husband and wife who stood at right angles, to have their wounds healed by Law, would have needed to have watched the hundred thousand hours of their wedded life, known and heard the million thoughts and words which had passed in the dim spaces of their world, to have been cognisant of the million reasons why they neither of them felt that they could have done other than they had done.
Reading their hearts by the light of knowledge such as this, he would not have been surprised that, brought into this place of remedy, they seemed to enter into a sudden league.

A look passed between them.

It was not friendly, it had no appeal; but it sufficed.

There seemed to be expressed in it the knowledge bred by immemorial experience and immemorial time: This law before which we stand was not made by us! As dogs, when they hear the crack of a far whip, will shrink, and in their whole bearing show wary quietude, so Hughs and Mrs.Hughs, confronted by the questionings of Law, made only such answers as could be dragged from them.

In a voice hardly above a whisper Mrs.Hughs told her tale.