To a renewed outburst of that clamour--the thing was on the tick of beginning--Ima raised the flap that covered the entrance to the marquee and stepped within. Simultaneously the shouting stilled with a sudden jerk that left an immense silence--Foxy Pinsent had stepped into the ring. She stopped as if the sudden stillness struck her; and she took in the scene, her hands clasped against her breast. The ring had been contrived within the inner circle that forms the working part of a circus arena. The canvas belt, some two feet high, that surrounded this circle during a performance, had been taken up as to the arc farthest from where she stood and brought forward to the great pole of the marquee. The wide half circle thus bounded was made the ring for the fight. Around the tent the lights above the seats had been extinguished; the great lamp of many burners that encircled the mast enclosed the ring in its arc of clear light. In the surrounding dimness, as Ima paused and watched, were the high tiers of red-draped, empty benches. Within the light's arc she saw the rival crowds on either hand; straight before her the gap that separated the two clusters and declared their enmity. At the centre front of each, against the canvas that bounded the ring, was a little caving-in of the throng where men in their shirt-sleeves knelt. Pinsent had just stepped out from this knot on the one side: in the other she saw Percival seated on her father's knee. A hundred men and more were behind Pinsent, behind Percival forty or fewer; there was significance in how each throng stood closely packed, refusing the accommodation that the ample space between them offered--hatred was deep that preferred the discomfort of jostling and tiptoe standing to easier view at the price of mingling. Every face was beneath a peaked cap or dented bowler hat and above a scarfed neck; a pipe in most caused, as it were, a grey, shifting bank of smoke, cut flat by the darkness above the lamp's reflection, to be swaying above the caps as though they balanced it. Here and there were clumps of colour where women in blouses of red or white clustered together. Sweat, for the place was hot, glistened on this face and on that as if the grey, shifting bank above them exuded drops of water. There was something very sinister, very eerie, in the complete silence that for a moment held the scene; and Ima started to hear a sound of breathing and of restless movement. She looked around. On either hand of where she stood the menagerie cages were banked. Dark or tawny forms were coiled or stretched there; in one cage was a big wolf, head down, nose at the bars, that watched the light as she watched it.