Page:Restless Earth.djvu/93

stride and overtook her just as she turned and entered a larger corner store.

She paused just inside the door to examine her appearance in a convenient mirror. The constable caught a glimpse of her profile as she dabbed her cheeks furtively with a handkerchief. He exercised his prerogative to linger upon the kerb in the hope that she would turn and afford him an opportunity to judge her quiet beauty full-face. He was disappointed; for she turned her back upon him and disappeared into the store.

“Lost,” he told himself, nodding his head very slightly, and looking wise with the wisdom which his profession had bred in him. “She’s at a loose end and doesn’t know where to go next. I wonder what the row was all about?”

He likened her to a child he had once found sitting beneath a hedge, hopelessly lost. The child had been pale, with big brown eyes which stared into the darkening night as though the end of the world were at hand and tears no longer availing, and had been overjoyed to see him.

He waited hopefully upon the kerb. His mission in life was to be of use. Women often consulted him in their difficulties—especially their marital ones—when he happened to be handy, but his luck did not often run to women like Grace. He realised that a man of his years should have outgrown these foolish sympathies—this desire to be a sort of spiritual father to ill-used wives—but, wherein was the use of living if one did not do his best to make the wheels run easily for the unfortunate? He admitted that, had he been less free with his advice and more ready with the power which the law gave him, his hair might not have greyed while still he lacked chevrons upon his sleeve; but that was a matter for small regret when even the most hardened sinners in the town knew him by his first name.

The day was very hot, so hot that even the measured pace of a policeman was rendered laborious,