He looked down. The body of a man lay uncouthly flung beside the glow--that had been built up hastily of brushwood and dead sticks in a hopeless effort to rekindle a late-extinguished spark of life. The flame painted the waxen face and fallen jaw with a hectic mockery of vitality, and glinted on a dribbling splash in the forehead where something had crushed in through the very ring of a cherished love-lock. A woman was down upon the grass by the figure--moaning to it, caressing it, with some piteous shame of the awful publicity of her conduct; for she would not believe in the impotence of her agony to rouse that silent shape to any responsive gesture; and, in the background of her thoughts, was some insane speculation as to how, when all was right again, she should hold her terror an apology for her emotion. Close behind her stood a little crying boy, his fingers in his eyes; and it was moving to see how, in the youngling’s cap and in the breast of the kneeling woman, were merry knots of Christmas--earnests of a thoughtless time. “The guard?” murmured the new-comer. He grasped the situation with only too sure an intuition. The glooming mass in the road was nothing less than that same lusty vehicle they had seen but an hour or two before rumble away from the inn-door, its jovial horn answering to the lips of that formless thing by the fire. “Aye,” grunted the coachman, from the covert of his preposterous neckcloth. He had come up on the moment, from the task of slowly manipulating his cut traces. “That’s the last of Charlie,” he said, with some thickness of fury in his tone. “No, no!” moaned up the woman. “Not the last--my God, no!” “Don’t take on, my dear,” he said. “Charlie done his dooty like a man; and there’s not a coach vheel ’ll go over that there patch on the road but ’ll roll up a bloody account agen his murderers.” She only sighed miserably in answer. The deep apathy of grief was in her veins like a drug. “How many?” said Tuke. “Six, if there was vun, sir. Six cursed ruffians to dance agen the sky and serve the crows for black pudden, so be there’s any vally in the fellowship of the road.” He shook his pillow of an arm aloft--finely, for all the heavy oddity of his appearance. “Aye,” he murmured, in response to a gesture--“the man’s wife and his youngster.” At the word a woman--one from the huddled group of robbed and terrified passengers--came out into the glow, and snatching up the child, forced it whimpering into its mother’s arms. The act was well conceived. The desolate creature caught at the hope, and held it convulsively against her breast; and in a moment her burdened heart found relief. Mr. Tuke backed silently. “No,” the coachman had growled to him--“_he_ wanted no help. _He_ could get on well enough now. There was nothing for it but to complete his crippled stage, and as quickly as possible set the law in motion.”