She couldn't tell no more than he could where that young girl had gone! The tears, stealing forth, chased each other down the seamstress's thin cheeks.

Her face had now but little likeness to the face with which she had stood confronting Hughs when she informed him of the little model's flight.

None of the triumph which had leaped out of her bruised heart, none of the strident malice with which her voice, whether she would or no, strove to avenge her wounded sense of property; none of that unconscious abnegation, so very near to heroism, with which she had rushed and caught up her baby from beneath the bayonet, when, goaded by her malice and triumph, Hughs had rushed to seize that weapon.

None of all that, but, instead, a pitiable terror of the ordeal before her--a pitiful, mute, quivering distress, that this man, against whom, two hours before, she had felt such a store of bitter rancour, whose almost murderous assault she had so narrowly escaped, should now be in this plight.
The sight of her emotion penetrated through his spectacles to something lying deep in the old butler.
"Don't you take on," he said; "I'll stand by yer.

He shan't treat yer with impuniness." To his uncomplicated nature the affair was still one of tit for tat.
Mrs.Hughs became mute again.