The boy sat down, held out his wrists for the handcuffs, the steel clicked, the pen scratched in the silence.
Danner got up, marshaled his prisoners, and they marched out. The eyes of every one in the court-room followed them, the eyes of Ward fixed on Graves. As he looked, he saw a woman sitting on the last one of the benches near the door. Her head was bowed on her hand, but as the procession passed she raised her face, all red and swollen with weeping, and, with a look of love and tenderness and despair, fixed her eyes on Graves. The boy did not look at her, but marched by, his head resolutely erect.
Ward returned to his office and to his work, but all that day, in the excitement on the floor of the exchange, during luncheon at the club, at his desk, in his carriage going home at evening, he saw before him that row of heads--the white poll of old Delaney, the woolly pate of the negro, but, more than all, the brown head of Harry Graves. And when he entered his home at evening the sadness of his reflections was still in his face.
"What’s the matter this evening?" asked Elizabeth. "Nerves?"
"I’ve sent a boy to the penitentiary." Ward felt a kind of relief, the first he had felt all that day, in dealing thus bluntly, thus brutally, with himself. Elizabeth knit her brows, and her eyes winked rapidly in the puzzled expression that came to them.
"You remember Harry Graves?" asked her father.
"Yes, that young man. Well, I’ve sent him to the penitentiary."
"What is that you say, Stephen?" asked Mrs. Ward, coming just then into the room. She had heard his words, but she wished to hear them again.
"I just said I’d sent Harry Graves to the penitentiary."
"For how long?" asked Mrs. Ward, with a judicial desire for all the facts, usually unnecessary in her judgments.
"Why, how easily he got off!" said Mrs. Ward. "And do hurry now, Stephen. You’re late."
Elizabeth saw the pain her mother had been so unconscious of in her father’s face, and she gave Ward a little pat on the shoulder.
"You dear old goose," she said, "to feel that way about it. Of course, you didn’t send him--it was John Eades. That’s his business."
"Doubtless it will be a good thing for the young man," said Mrs. Ward. "He has only himself to blame, anyway."