Angel was ready with his answer. It seemed that he still represented Wesley Dyker and that Mr. Dyker was not disposed to be so hard on her as impartial justice demanded that he should be. In the back-room of a nearby saloon there were a lawyer and a notary in waiting. If Mary would promise to swear to and sign before them a prepared paper denying the accusations she had made to Marian, Angel would now, by means of a second note, see that the sitting magistrate did but fine her, and would hand her at once the amount of that fine. She had supposed that her arrest had been on the charge of larceny from Mrs. Turner's boarding-house; she had not known that she was accused of no more than the practice of her trade, and she could scarcely credit news so good as this which Angel brought her. "An' I won't have to go to Miss Marian?" she asked. "No. Meest' Dyk' want thees paper for hees girl--jus' to square heemself witha hees girl--no more. You go where you want." "An' the judge'll let me off?" "Right away." She promised, and a moment later was led into the court-room. She saw the gaping, leering crowd, which filled half of that apartment beyond the low grating. She saw the stolid policemen herding their charges as stockyard hands herd cattle for the slaughter. She saw the stealthy slavers buzzing in and out, bent upon nefarious rescue; the waiting lawyers on the outer bench and the laughing lawyers inside, joking together or making mirth before the desk at which, in his black robe, sat the weary, cynical, indifferent magistrate, his face as expressionless as that of a Chinese Joss. She heard, between the roars of elevated trains, the unintelligible oaths, administered, as she now understood that the average oath is administered, with a rapidity that robbed them of all dignity and most effect; the drone of testimony constantly interrupted to the point of confusion and always curtailed to the exclusion of essential truth; the mechanical pronouncement of sentence that ended, as if the two things were on phrase, in the summoning of the succeeding case. All this she saw and heard and disregarded. She had been struck down, trapped, held fast in the grip of the invisible enemy that she thought of as the City. She had been conscious of nothing but the living Fear, and now, Angel had told her, some portion of relief was at hand. Her arraignment, the payment of her fine, her meeting with the waiting Italian, her progress to the nearby saloon where the lawyer and the notary were ready for her--all this passed like a vision of the night. She signed without reading it--though she would not have understood it if she had read it--the formal denial to which her affirmation was immediately affixed. She was too dazed to think until, leaving the three smiling men behind her, she had turned again into free Sixth Avenue.