"Well, I suppose you wouldn't notice it much"--(A veiled allusion to the Romantic and Forsaken Lover!)--"but she's enough to make any man make a fool of himself over her." He heaved a ponderous sigh. "I expect I'm well out of it! She'd never have given me more than a string of beads to play with. And if by a miracle she had succumbed to my charms, I should have been as jealous as a dog every time she went to the theatre! No sound way out of it! All just silly!" He looked up and caught Arthur smiling at him. He burst into a laugh, "Lord, what an ass I am! Come along, old chap! If we get moving, we shall be just in time to see Trixie Kayper at the Amphitheatre. I hear she knocks stars out of High Heaven with her twinkling feet!" Arthur agreed that the performance was one not to be missed. CHAPTER XXX A VARIETY SHOW The Majesty of the Law--nay, in theory at least, the Majesty of England--sat enthroned at Raylesbury. In the big chair in the centre the Honourable Sir Christopher Lance, in his newly powdered wig and his scarlet robes--the "Red Judge" whose splendour solaces (so it is said) even the prisoners with a sense of their own importance. On his right the High Sheriff, splendid also in Deputy-Lieutenant's uniform, but bored, sleepy after a good lunch, and half-stifled by sitting indoors all day in bad air, instead of agreeably killing something under the open vault of Heaven. Beyond him the Chaplain, smooth-faced, ruddy, rather severe, in gown and cassock of silk so fine and stiff as to seem capable of standing up straight on its own account, even if His Reverence chanced not to be inside. At the end, the Under-Sheriff, unobtrusively ready to come to his Chief's assistance. On his Lordship's left--a sad falling off in impressiveness--Arthur in mufti, and on his other side Mr. Williams, the Judge's clerk, a fat man of constant but noiseless activity, ever coming in and going out, fetching nothing from nowhere and taking it back again (at any rate so far as the casual spectator could perceive). Behind, such county magistrates as were attracted by curiosity or by a laudable desire to take a lesson in doing justice. In front, to right and left, and down below, divided from this august company (for even on Marshal and Clerk fell rays of reflected dignity) the world of struggle--the Bar, the solicitors, jury, witnesses, prisoners, spectators, with great policemen planted at intervals like forest-trees amongst the scrub. For mainspring of the whole machine, the Clerk of Assize, a charming and courtly old gentleman, telling everybody what to do and when to do it, polite, though mostly unintelligible, to the prisoners, confidential and consolatory to the jury, profoundly anxious that nothing should ruffle so much as a hair of his lordship's wig.