Dion shut himself into his room, sat down in a big armchair, lit his pipe and thought about the Clarke case. He had just told Doctor Mayson a white lie. He was determined not to think about his Rosamund: he dared not do that; so his mind fastened on the Clarke case. Almost ferociously he flung himself upon it, called upon the unknown Mrs. Clarke, the woman whom he had never seen to banish from him his Rosamund, to interpose between her and him. For Rosamund was inevitably suffering, and if he thought about that suffering his deep anxiety, his pity, his yearning would grow till they were almost unendurable, might even lead his feet to the room upstairs, the room forbidden to him to-night. So he called to Mrs. Clarke, and at last, obedient to his insistent demand, she came and did her best for him, came, he imagined, from Constantinople, to keep him company in this night of crisis.

As Daventry had described her, as Bruce Evelin had, with casual allusions and suggestive hints, built her up before Dion in the talk after dinner that night, so she was now in the little room: a woman of intellect and of great taste, with an intense love for, and fine knowledge of, beautiful things: a woman who was almost a sensualist in her adoration for fine and rare things.

"I detest the sensation of sinking down in things!"

Who had said that once with energy in Dion's hearing? Oh—Rosamund, of course! But she must not be admitted into Dion's life in these hours of waiting. Mrs. Clarke must be allowed to reign. She had come (in Dion's imagination) all the way from the city of wood and of marble beside the seaway of the Golden Horn, a serious, intellectual and highly cultivated woman, whom a cruel fate—Kismet—was now about to present to the world as a horrible woman. Pale, thin, rather melancholy she was, a reader of many books, a great lover of nature, a woman who cared very much for her one child. Why should Fate play such a woman such a trick? Perhaps because she was very unconventional, and it is unwise for the bird which sings in the cage of diplomacy to sing any but an ordinary song.

Daventry had dwelt several times on Mrs. Clarke's unconventionality; evidently the defense meant to lay stress on it.

So now Dion sat with a pale, thin, unconventional woman, and she told him about the life at Stamboul. She knew, of course, that he had hated Constantinople. He allowed her to know that. And she pointed out to him that he knew nothing of the wonderful city, upon which Russia breathes from the north, and which catches, too, strange airs and scents and murmurs of voices from distant places of Asia. What does the passing tourist of a Pera hotel know about the great city of the Turks? Nothing worth knowing. The roar of the voices of the Levant deafens his ears; the glitter of the shop windows in the Grande Rue blinds his eyes. He knows not the exquisite and melancholy charm, full of nuances and of the most fragile and evanescent subtleties, which Constantinople holds for those who know her and love her well.

The defense was evidently going to make much of Mrs. Clarke's passion for the city on the Bosporus. Daventry had alluded to it more than once, and Bruce Evelin had said, "Mrs. Clarke has always had an extraordinary feeling for places. If her husband had accused her of a liaison with Eyub, or of an unholy fancy for the forest of Belgrad, we might have been in a serious difficulty. She had, I know, a regular romance once with the Mosquee Verte at Brusa."

Evidently she was a woman whom ordinary people would be likely to misunderstand. Dion sat in his arm-chair trying to understand her. The effort would help him to forget, or to ignore if he couldn't forget, what was going on upstairs in the little house. He pulled hard at his pipe, as an aid to his mind; he sat alone for a long while with Mrs. Clarke. Sometimes he looked across the Golden Horn from a bit of waste ground in Pera, near to a small cemetery: it was from there, towards evening, that he had been able to "feel" Stamboul, to feel it as an unique garden city, held by the sea, wooden and frail, marble and enduring. And somewhere in the great and mysterious city Mrs. Clarke had lived and been adored by the husband who, apparently still adoring, was now trying to get rid of her.

Sometimes Dion heard voices rising from the crowded harbor of the Golden Horn. They crept up out of the mystery of the evening; voices from the caiques, and from the boats of the fishermen, and from the big sailing vessels which ply to the harbors of the East, and from the steamers at rest near the Galata Bridge, and from the many craft of all descriptions strung out towards the cypress-crowned hill of Eyub. And Mrs. Clarke, standing beside him, began to explain to him in a low and hoarse voice what these strange cries of the evening meant.

Daventry had mentioned that she had a hoarse voice.

At a little after three o'clock Dion sat forward abruptly in his chair and listened intently. He fancied he had heard a faint cry. He waited, surrounded by silence, enveloped by silence. There was a low drumming in his ears. Mrs. Clarke had escaped like a phantom. Stamboul, with its mosques, its fountains, its pigeons and its plane trees, had faded away. The voices from the Golden Horn were stilled. The drumming in Dion's ears grew louder. He stood up. He felt very hot, and a vein in his left temple was beating—not fluttering, but beating hard.

He heard, this time really heard, a cry overhead, and then the muffled sound of some one moving about; and he went to the door, opened it and passed out into the hall. He did not go upstairs, but waited in the hall until Doctor Mayson came down, looking as rosy and serene and unconcerned as ever.

"Well, Mr. Leith," he said, "you're a father. I congratulate you. You wife has got through beautifully."

"Yes?"

"By the way, it's a boy."

"Yes, of course."

Doctor Mayson looked genuinely surprised.

"Why 'of course'? I don't quite understand."

"She knew it was going to be a boy."

The doctor smiled faintly.

"Women often have strange fancies at such times. I mean before they are confined."

"But you see she was right. It is a boy."

"Exactly," returned the doctor, looking at his nails.

Dion saw the star falling above the hill of Drouva.

Did the Hermes know?



CHAPTER III

On the following Sunday afternoon Dion was able to fulfil his promise to Daventry. Rosamund and the baby were "doing beautifully"; he was not needed at home, so he set out with Daventry, who came to fetch him, to visit Mrs. Willie Chetwinde in Lowndes Square.

When they reached the house Daventry said:

"Now for Mrs. Clarke. She's really a wonderful woman, Dion, and she's got a delicious profile."

"Oh, it's that—"

"No, it isn't."

He gently pushed Mrs. Chetwinde's bell.

As they went upstairs they heard a soft hum of voices.

"Mrs. Clarke's got heaps of people on her side," whispered Daventry. "This is a sort of rallying ground for the defense."

"Where's her child? Here?"

"No, with some relations till the trial's over."

The butler opened the door, and immediately Dion's eyes rested on Mrs. Clarke, who happened to be standing very near to it with Esme Darlington. Directly Dion saw her he knew at whom he was looking. Something—he could not have said what—told him.

By a tall pedestal of marble, on which was poised a marble statuette of Echo,—not that Echo who babbled to Hera, but she who, after her punishment, fell in love with Narcissus,—he saw a very thin, very pale, and strangely haggard-looking woman of perhaps thirty-two talking to Esme Darlington. At first sight she did not seem beautiful to Dion. He was accustomed to the radiant physical bloom of his Rosamund. This woman, with her tenuity, her pallor, her haunted cheeks and temples, her large, distressed and observant eyes—dark hazel in color under brown eyebrows drawn with a precise straightness till they neared the bridge of the nose and there turning abruptly downwards, her thin and almost white-lipped mouth, her cloudy brown hair which had no shine or sparkle, her rather narrow and pointed chin, suggested to him unhealthiness, a human being perhaps stricken by some obscure disease which had drained her body of all fresh color, and robbed it of flesh, had caused to come upon her something strange, not easily to be defined, which almost suggested the charnel-house.

As he was looking at her, Mrs. Clarke turned slightly and glanced up at the statue of Echo, and immediately Dion realized that she had beauty. The line of her profile was wonderfully delicate and refined, almost ethereal in its perfection; and the shape of her small head was exquisite. Her head, indeed, looked girlish. Afterwards he knew that she had enchanting hands—moving purities full of expressiveness—and slim little wrists. Her expression was serious, almost melancholy, and in her whole personality, shed through her, there was a penetrating refinement, a something delicate, wild and feverish. She looked very sensitive and at the same time perfectly self-possessed, as if, perhaps, she dreaded Fate but could never be afraid of a fellow-creature. He thought:

"She's like Echo after her punishment."

On his way to greet Mrs. Chetwinde, he passed by her; as he did so she looked at him, and he saw that she thoroughly considered him, with a grave swiftness which seemed to be an essential part of her personality. Then she spoke to Esme Darlington. Dion just caught the sound of her voice, veiled, husky, but very individual and very attractive—a voice that could never sing, but that could make of speech a music frail and evanescent as a nocturne of Debussy's.

"Daventry's right," thought Dion. "That woman is surely innocent."

Mrs. Chetwinde, who was as haphazard, as apparently absent-minded and as shrewd in her own house as in the houses of others, greeted Dion with a vague cordiality. Her husband, a robust and very definite giant, with a fan-shaped beard, welcomed him largely.

"Never appear at my wife's afternoons, you know," he observed, in a fat and genial voice. "But to-day's exceptional. Always stick to an innocent woman in trouble."

He lowered his voice in speaking the last sentence, and looked very human. And immediately Dion was aware of a special and peculiar atmosphere in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room on this Sunday afternoon, of something poignant almost, though lightly veiled with the sparkling gossamer which serves to conceal undue angularities, something which just hinted at tragedy confronted with courage, at the attempted stab and the raised shield of affection. Here Mrs. Clarke was in sanctuary. He glanced towards her again with a deepening interest.

"Canon Wilton's coming in presently," said Mrs. Chetwinde. "He's preaching at St. Paul's this afternoon, or perhaps it's Westminster Abbey—something of that kind."

"I've heard him two or three times," answered Dion, who was on very good, though not on very intimate, terms with Canon Wilton. "I'd rather hear him than anybody."

"In the pulpit—yes, I suppose so. I'm scarcely an amateur of sermons. He's a volcano of sincerity, and never sends out ashes. It's all red-hot lava. Have you met Cynthia Clarke?"

"No."

"She's over there, echoing my Echo. Would you like——?"

"Very much indeed."

"Then I'll—"

An extremely pale man, with long, alarmingly straight hair and wandering eyes almost the color of silver, said something to her.

"Watteau? Oh, no—he died in 1721, not in 1722," she replied. "The only date I can never remember is William the Conqueror. But of course you couldn't remember about Watteau. It's distance makes memory. You're too near."

"That's the fan painter, Murphy-Elphinston, Watteau's reincarnation," she added to Dion. "He's always asking questions about himself. Cynthia—this is Mr. Dion Leith. He wishes——" She drifted away, not, however, without dexterously managing to convey Mr. Darlington with her.

Dion found himself looking into the large, distressed eyes of Mrs. Clarke. Daventry was standing close to her, but, with a glance at his friend, moved away.

"I should like to sit down," said Mrs. Clarke.

"Here are two chairs——"

"No, I'd rather sit over there under the Della Robbia. I can see Echo from there."

She walked very slowly and languidly, as if tired, to a large and low sofa covered with red, which was exactly opposite to the statuette. Dion followed her, thinking about her age. He supposed her to be about thirty-two or thirty-three, possibly a year or two more or less. She was very simply dressed in a gray silk gown with black and white lines in it. The tight sleeves of it were unusually long and ended in points. They were edged with some transparent white material which rested against her small hands.

She sat down and he sat down by her, and they began to talk. Unlike Mrs. Chetwinde, Mrs. Clarke showed that she was alertly attending to all that was said to her, and, when she spoke, she looked at the person to whom she was speaking, looked steadily and very unself-consciously. Dion mentioned that he had once been to Constantinople.

"Did you care about it?" said Mrs. Clarke, rather earnestly.

"I'm afraid I disliked it, although I found it, of course, tremendously interesting. In fact, I almost hated it."

"That's only because you stayed in Pera," she answered, "and went about with a guide."

"But how do you know?"—he was smiling.

"Well, of course you did."

"Yes."

"I could easily make you love it," she continued, in an oddly impersonal way, speaking huskily.

Dion had never liked huskiness before, but he liked it now.

"You are fond of it, I believe?" he said.

His eyes met hers with a great deal of interest.

He considered her present situation an interesting one; there was drama in it; there was the prospect of a big fight, of great loss or great gain, destruction or vindication.

In her soul already the drama was being played. He imagined her soul in turmoil, peopled with a crowd of jostling desires and fears, and he was thinking a great many things about her, and connected with her, almost simultaneously—so rapidly a flood of thoughts seemed to go by in the mind—as he put his question.

"Yes, I am," replied Mrs. Clarke. "Stamboul holds me very fast in its curiously inert grip. It's a grip like this."

She held out her small right hand, and he put his rather large and sinewy brown hand into it. The small hand folded itself upon his in a curious way—feeble and fierce at the same time, it seemed—and held him. The hand was warm, almost hot, and soft, and dry as a fire is dry—so dry that it hisses angrily if water is thrown on it.

"Now, you are trying to get away," she said. "And of course you can, but——"

Dion made a movement as if to pull away his hand, but Mrs. Clarke retained it. How was that? He scarcely knew; in fact he did not know. She did not seem to be doing anything definite to keep him, did not squeeze or grip his hand, or cling to it; but his hand remained in hers nevertheless.

"There," she said, letting his hand go. "That is how Stamboul holds. Do you understand?"

Mrs. Chetwinde's vague eyes had been on them during this little episode. Dion had had time to see that, and to think, "Now, at such a time, no one but an absolutely innocent woman would do in public what Mrs. Clarke is doing to me." Mrs. Chetwinde, he felt sure, full of all worldly knowledge, must be thinking the very same thing.

"Yes," he said. "I think I do. But I wonder whether it could hold me like that."

"I know it could."

"May I ask how you know?"

"Why not? Simply by my observation of you."

Dion remembered the swift grave look of consideration she had given to him as he came into the room. Something almost combative rose up in him, and he entered into an argument with her, in the course of which he was carried away into the revelation of his mental comparison between Constantinople and Greece, a comparison into which entered a moral significance. He even spoke of the Christian significance of the Hermes of Olympia. Mrs. Clarke listened to him with a very still, and apparently a very deep, attention.

"I've been to Greece," she said simply, when he had finished.

"You didn't feel at all as I did, as I do?"

"You may know Greece, but you don't know Stamboul," she said quietly.

"If you had shown it to me I might feel very differently," Dion said, with a perhaps slightly banal politeness.

And yet he did not feel entirely banal as he said it.

"Come out again and I will show it to you," she said.

She was almost staring at him, at his chest and shoulders, not at his face, but her eyes still kept their unself-conscious and almost oddly impersonal look.

"You are going back there?"

"Of course, when my case is over."

Dion felt very much surprised. He knew that Mrs. Clarke's husband was accredited to the British Embassy at Constantinople; that the scandal about her was connected with that city and with its neighborhood—Therapia, Prinkipo, and other near places, that both the co-respondents named in the suit lived there. Whichever way the case went, surely Constantinople must be very disagreeable to Mrs. Clarke from now onwards. And yet she was going back there, and apparently intended to take up her life there again. She evidently either saw or divined his surprise, for she added in the husky voice:

"Guilt may be governed by circumstances. I suppose it is full of alarms. But I think an innocent woman who allows herself to be driven out of a place she loves by a false accusation is merely a coward. But all this is very uninteresting to you. The point is, I shall soon be settled down again at Constantinople, and ready to make you see it as it really is, if you ever return there."

She had spoken without hardness or any pugnacity; there was no defiance in her manner, which was perfectly simple and straightforward.

"Your moral comparison between Constantinople and Greece—it isn't fair, by the way, to compare a city with a country—doesn't interest me at all. People can be disgusting anywhere. Greece is no better than Turkey. It has a wonderfully delicate, pure atmosphere; but that doesn't influence the morals of the population. Fine Greek art is the purest art in the world; but that doesn't mean that the men who created it had only pure thoughts or lived only pure lives. I never read morals into art, although I'm English, and it's the old hopeless English way to do that. The man who made Echo"—she turned her large eyes towards the statuette—"may have been an evil liver. In fact, I believe he was. But Echo is an exquisite pure bit of art."

Dion thought of Rosamund's words about Praxiteles as they sat before Hermes. His Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke were mentally at opposite poles; yet they were both good women.

"My friend Daventry would agree with you, I know," he said.

"He's a clever and a very dear little man. Who's that coming in?"

Dion looked and saw Canon Wilton. He told Mrs. Clarke who it was.

"Enid told me he was coming. I should like to know him."

"Shall I go and tell him so?"

"Presently. How's your baby? I'm told you've got a baby."

Dion actually blushed. Mrs. Clarke gazed at the blush, and no doubt thoroughly understood it, but she did not smile, or look arch, or full of feminine understanding.

"It's very well, thank you. It's just like other babies."

"So was mine. Babies are always said to be wonderful, and never are. And we love ours chiefly because they aren't. I hate things with wings growing out of their shoulders. My boy's a very naughty boy."

They talked about the baby, and then about Mrs. Clarke's son of ten; and then Canon Wilton came up, shook hands warmly with Dion, and was introduced by Mrs. Chetwinde to Mrs. Clarke.

Presently, from the other side of the room where he was standing with Esme Darlington, Dion saw them in conversation; saw Mrs. Clarke's eyes fixed on the Canon's almost fiercely sincere face.

"It's going to be an abominable case," murmured Mr. Darlington in Dion's ear. "We must all stand round her."

"I can't imagine how any one could think such a woman guilty," said Dion.

"It has all come about through her unconventionality." He pulled his beard and lifted his ragged eyebrows. "It really is much wiser for innocent people, such as Cynthia, to keep a tight hold on the conventions. They have their uses. They have their place in the scheme. But she never could see it, and look at the result."

"But then don't you think she'll win?"

"No one can tell."

"In any case, she tells me she's going back to live at Constantinople."

"Madness! Sheer madness!" said Mr. Darlington, almost piteously. "I shall beg her not to."

Dion suppressed a smile. That day he had gained the impression that Mrs. Clarke had a will of iron.

When he went up to say good-by to her, Daventry had already gone; he said he had work to do on the case.

"May I wish you success?" Dion ventured to say, as he took her hand.

"Thank you," she answered. "I think you must go in for athletic exercises, don't you?"

Her eyes were fixed on the breadth of his chest, and then traveled to his strong, broad shoulders.

"Yes, I'm very keen on them."

"I want my boy to go in for them. It's so important to be healthy."

"Rather!"

He felt the Stamboul touch in her soft, hot hand. As he let it go, he added:

"I can give you the address of a first-rate instructor if your boy ever wants to be physically trained. I go to him. His name's Jenkins."

"Thank you."

She was still looking at his chest and shoulders. The expression of distress in her eyes seemed to be deepening. But a tall man, Sir John Killigrew, one of her adherents, spoke to her, and she turned to give him her complete attention.

"I'll walk with you, if you're going," said Canon Wilton's strong voice in Dion's ear.

"That's splendid. I'll just say good-by to Mrs. Chetwinde."

He found her by the tea-table with three or four men and two very smart women. As he came up one of the latter was saying:

"It's all Lady Ermyntrude's fault. She always hated Cynthia, and she has a heart of stone."

The case again!

"Oh, are you going?" said Mrs. Chetwinde.

She got up and came away from the tea-table.

"D'you like Cynthia Clarke?" she asked.

"Yes, very much. She interests me."

"Ah?"

She looked at him, and seemed about to say something, but did not speak.

"You saw her take my hand," he said, moved by a sudden impulse.

"Did she?"

"We were talking about Stamboul. She did it to show me——" He broke off. "I saw you felt, as I did, that no one but a through and through innocent woman could have done it, just now—like that, I mean."

"Of course Cynthia is innocent," Mrs. Chetwinde said, rather coldly and very firmly. "There's Canon Wilton waiting for you."

She turned away, but did not go back to the tea-table; as Dion went out of the room he saw her sitting down on the red sofa by Mrs. Clarke.

Canon Wilton and he walked slowly away from the house. The Canon, who had some heart trouble of which he never spoke, was not allowed to walk fast; and to-day he was tired after his sermon at the Abbey. He inquired earnestly about Rosamund and the child, and seemed made happy by the good news Dion was able to give him.

"Has it made all life seem very different to you?" he asked.

Dion acknowledged that it had.

"I was half frightened at the thought of the change which was coming," he said. "We were so very happy as we were, you see."

The Canon's intense gray eyes shot a glance at him, which he felt rather than saw, in the evening twilight.

"I hope you'll be even happier now."

"It will be a different sort of happiness now."

"I think children bind people together more often than not. There are cases when it's not so, but I don't think yours is likely to be one of them."

"Oh, no."

"Is it a good-looking baby?"

"No, really it's not. Even Rosamund thinks that. D'you know, so far she's marvelously reasonable in her love."

"That's splendid," said Canon Wilton, with a strong ring in his voice. "An unreasonable love is generally a love with something rotten at its roots."

Dion stood still.

"Oh, is that true really?"

The Canon paused beside him. They were in Eaton Square, opposite to St. Peter's.

"I think so. But I hate anything that approaches what I call mania. Religious mania, for instance, is abhorrent to me, and, I should think, displeasing to God. Any mania entering into a love clouds that purity which is the greatest beauty of love. Mania—it's detestable!"

He spoke almost with a touch of heat, and put his hand on Dion's shoulder.

"Beware of it, my boy."

"Yes."

They walked on, talking of other things. A few minutes before they parted they spoke of Mrs. Clarke.

"Did you know her before to-day?" asked the Canon.

"No. I'd never even seen her. How dreadful for her to have to face such a case."

"Yes, indeed."

"The fact that she's innocent gives her a great pull, though. I realized what a pull when I was having a talk with her."

"I don't know much about the case," was all that the Canon said. "I hope justice will be done in it when it comes on."

Dion thought that there was something rather implacable in his voice.

"I don't believe Mrs. Clarke doubts that."

"Did she say so?" asked Canon Wilton.

"No. But I felt that she expected to win—almost knew she would win."

"I see. She has confidence in the result."

"She seems to have."

"Women often have more confidence in difficult moments than we men. Well, here I must leave you."

He held out his big, unwavering hand to Dion.

"Good-by. God bless you both, and the child, whether it's plain or not. One good thing's added to us when we start rather ill-favored; the chance of growing into something well-favored."

He gripped Dion's hand and walked slowly, but powerfully, away.



CHAPTER IV

As Dion had said, the baby was an ordinary baby. "In looks," the nurse remarked, "he favors his papa." Certainly in this early stage of his career the baby had little of the beauty and charm of Rosamund. As his head was practically bald, his forehead, which was wrinkled as if by experience and the troubles of years, looked abnormally high. His face, full of puckers, was rather red; his nose meant very little as yet; his mouth, with perpetually moving lips, was the home of bubbles. His eyes were blue, and looked large in his extremely small countenance, which was often decorated with an expression of mild inquiry. This expression, however, sometimes changed abruptly to a network of wrath, in which every feature, and even the small bald head, became involved. Then the minute feet made feeble dabs, or stabs, at the atmosphere; the tiny fists doubled themselves and wandered to and fro as if in search of the enemy; and a voice came forth out of the temple, very personal and very intense, to express the tempest of the soul.

"Hark at him!" said the nurse. "He knows already what he wants and what he don't want."

And Rosamund, listening as only a mother can listen, shook her head over him, trying to condemn the rage, but enjoying the strength of her child in the way of mothers, to whom the baby's roar perhaps brings the thought, "What a fine, bold man he'll be some day." If Rosamund had such a thought the nurse encouraged it with her. "He's got a proud spirit already, ma'am. He's not to be put upon. Have his way he will, and I don't altogether blame him." Nor, be sure, did Rosamund altogether blame the young varmint for anything. Perhaps in his tiny fisticuffs and startlingly fierce cries she divined the Doric, in embryo, as it were; perhaps when "little master" shrieked she thought of the columns of the Parthenon.

But Dion told the truth to Canon Wilton when he had said that Rosamund was marvelously reasonable, so far, in her love for her baby son. The admirable sanity, the sheer healthiness of outlook which Dion loved in her did not desert her now. To Dion it seemed that in the very calmness and good sense of her love she showed its great depth, showed that already she was thinking of her child's soul as well as of his little body.

Dion felt the beginnings of a change in Rosamund, but he did not find either her or himself suddenly and radically changed by the possession of a baby. He had thought that perhaps as mother and father they would both feel abruptly much older than before, even perhaps old. It was not so. Often Dion gazed at the baby as he bubbled and cooed, sneezed with an air of angry astonishment, stared at nothing with a look of shallow surmise, or, composing his puckers, slept, and Dion still felt young, even very young, and not at all like a father.

"I'm sure," he once said to Rosamund, "women feel much more like mothers when they have a baby than men feel like fathers."

"I feel like a mother all over," she replied, bending above the child. "In every least little bit of me."

"Then do you feel completely changed?"

"Completely, utterly."

Dion sat still for a moment gazing at her. She felt his look, perhaps, for she lifted her head, and her eyes went from the baby to him.

"What is it, Rosamund? What are you considering?"

"Well——" She hesitated. "Perhaps no one could quite understand, but I feel a sense of release."

"Release! From what?"

Again she hesitated; then she looked once more at the child almost as if she wished to gain something from his helplessness. At last she said:

"Dion, as you've given me him, I'll tell you. Very often in the past I've had an urgent desire some day to enter into the religious life."

"D'you—d'you mean to become a Roman Catholic and a nun?" he exclaimed, feeling, absurdly perhaps, almost afraid and half indignant.

"No. I've never wished to change my religion. There are Anglican sisterhoods, you know."

"But your singing!"

"I only intended to sing for a time. Then some day, when I felt quite ready, I meant—"

"But you married me?" he interrupted.

"Yes. So you see I gave it all up."

"But you said it was the child which had brought you a sensation of release!"

"Perhaps you have never been a prisoner of a desire which threatens to dominate your soul forever," she said, quietly evading his point and looking down, so that he could not see her eyes. "Look, he's waking!"

Surely she had moved abruptly and the movement had awakened the child. She began playing with him, and the conversation was broken.

The Clarke trial came on in May, when Robin was becoming almost elderly, having already passed no less than ten weeks in the midst of this wicked world. On the day before it opened, Daventry made Dion promise to come into court at least once to hear some of the evidence.

"A true friend would be there every day," he urged—"to back up his old chum."

"Business!" returned Dion laconically.

"What's your real reason against it?"

"Well, Rosamund hates this kind of case. I spoke to her about it the other day."

"What did she say?"

"That she was delighted you had something to do, and that she hoped, if Mrs. Clarke were innocent, she'd win. She pities her for being dragged through all this mud."

"Yes?"

"She said at the end that she hoped I wouldn't think her unsympathetic if she neither talked about the case nor read about it. She hates filling her mind with ugly details and horrible suggestions."

"I see."

"You know, Guy, Rosamund thinks—she's told me so more than once—that the mind and the soul are very sensitive, and that—that they ought to be watched over, and—and taken care of."

Dion looked rather uncomfortable as he finished. It was one thing to speak of such matters with Rosamund, and quite another to touch on them with a man, even a man who was a trusted friend.

"Perhaps you'd rather not come at all?"

"No, no. I'll come once. You know how keen I am on your making a good start."

Daventry took him at his word, and got him a seat beside Mrs. Chetwinde on the third day of the trial, when Mrs. Clarke's cross-examination, begun on the previous day, was continued by Sir Edward Jeffson, Beadon Clarke's leading counsel.

Dion told Rosamund where he was going when he left the house in the morning.

"I hope it will go well for poor Mrs. Clarke," she said kindly, but perhaps rather indifferently.

She had not looked at the reports of the case in the papers, and had not discussed its progress with Dion. He was not sorry for that. It was a horrible case, full of abominable allegations and suggestions such as he would have hated to discuss with Rosamund. As he stood in the little hall of their house, which was delicately scented with lavender and lit by pale sunshine, bidding her good-by, he realized the impossibility of such a woman as she was ever being "mixed up" in such a trial. Simply that couldn't happen, he thought. Instinct would keep her far from every suggestion of a possible impurity. He felt certain that Mrs. Clarke was innocent, but, as he looked into Rosamund's honest brown eyes, he thought that Mrs. Clarke must have been singularly imprudent. He remembered how she had held his hand in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room. Wisdom and unwisdom; he compared them: the one was a builder up, the other a destroyer of beauty—the beauty that is in every completely sane and perfectly poised life.

"Rose," he said, leaning forward to kiss his wife, "I think you are very wise."

"Why wise all of a sudden?" she asked, smiling.

"You keep the door of your life."

He glanced round at the little hall, simple, fresh, with a few white roses in a blue pot, the pale sunshine lying on the polished floor of wood, the small breeze coming in almost affectionately between snowy curtains. Purity—everything seemed to whisper of that, to imply that; simplicity ruling, complexity ruled out.

And then he was sitting in the crowded court, breathing bad air, hearing foul suggestions, watching strained or hateful faces, surrounded by people who were attracted by ugly things as vultures are attracted by the stench of dead and decaying bodies. At first he loathed being there; presently, however, he became interested, then almost fascinated by his surroundings and by the drama which was being played slowly out in the midst of them.

Daventry, in wig and gown, looked tremendously legal and almost severe in his tense gravity. Sir John Addington, his leader, a man of great fame, was less tense in his watchfulness, amazingly at his ease with the Court, and on smiling terms with the President, who, full of worldly and unworldly knowledge, held the balance of justice with an unwavering firmness. The jury looked startlingly commonplace, smug and sleepy, despite the variety of type almost inevitably presented by twelve human beings. Not one of them looked a rascal; not one of them looked an actively good man. The intense Englishness of them hit one in the face like a well-directed blow from a powerful fist. And they had to give the verdict on this complex drama of Stamboul! How much they would have to tell their wives presently! Their sense of their unusual importance pushed through the smugness heavily, like a bulky man in broadcloth showing through a dull crowd.

Mrs. Clarke occasionally glanced at them with an air of almost distressed inquiry, as if she had never seen such cabbages before, and was wondering about their gray matter. Her life in Stamboul must have effected changes in her. She looked almost exotic in this court, despite the simplicity of her gown, her unpretending little hat; as if her mind, perhaps, had become exotic. But she certainly did not look wicked. Dion was struck again by the strong mentality of her and by her haggardness. To him she seemed definitely a woman of mind, not at all an animal woman. When he gazed at her he felt that he was gazing at mind rather than at body. Just before she went into the box she met his eyes. She stared at him, as if carefully and strongly considering him; then she nodded. He bowed, feeling uncomfortable, feeling indeed almost a brute.

"She'll think I've come out of filthy curiosity," he thought, looking round at the greedy faces of the crowd.

No need to ask why those faces were there.

He felt still more uncomfortable when Mrs. Clarke was in the witness-box, and Sir Edward Jeffson took up the cross-examination which he had begun late in the afternoon of the previous day.

Dion had very seldom been in a Court of Justice, and had never before been in the Divorce Court. As the cross-examination of Mrs. Clarke lengthened out he felt as if his clothes, and the clothes of all the human beings who crowded about him, were being ruthlessly stripped off, as if an ugly and abominable nakedness were gradually appearing. The shame of it all was very hateful to him; and yet—yes, he couldn't deny it—there was a sort of dreadful fascination in it, too.

The two co-respondents, Hadi Bey and Aristide Dumeny of the French Embassy in Constantinople, were in court, sitting not far from Dion, to whom Mrs. Chetwinde, less vague than, but quite as self-possessed as, usual, pointed them out.

Both were young men. Hadi Bey, who of course wore the fez, was a fine specimen of the smart, alert, cosmopolitan and cultivated Turk of modern days. There was a peculiar look of vividness and brightness about him, in his piercing dark eyes, in his red lips, in his healthy and manly face with its rosy brown complexion and its powerful decided chin. He had none of the sleepiness and fatalistic languor of the fat hubble-bubble smoking Turk of caricature. The whole of him looked aristocratic, energetic, perfectly poised and absolutely self-possessed. Many of the women in court glanced at him without any distaste.

Aristide Dumeny was almost strangely different—an ashy-pale, dark-eyed, thin and romantic-visaged man, stamped with a curious expression of pain and fatalism. He looked as if he had seen much, dreamed many dreams, and suffered not a little. There was in his face something slightly contemptuous, as if, intellectually, he seldom gazed up at any man. He watched Mrs. Clarke in the box with an enigmatic closeness of attention which seemed wholly impersonal, even when she was replying to hideous questions about himself. That he had an interesting personality was certain. When his eyes rested on the twelve jurymen he smiled every so faintly. It seemed to him, perhaps, absurd that they should have power over the future of the woman in the witness-box.

That woman showed an extraordinary self-possession which touched dignity but which never descended to insolence. Despite her obvious cleverness and mental resource she preserved a certain simplicity. She did not pose as a passionate innocent, or assume any forced airs of supreme virtue. She presented herself rather as a woman of the world who was careless of the conventions, because she thought of them as chains which prevented free movement and were destructive of genuine liberty. She acknowledged that she had been a great deal with Hadi Bey and Dumeny, that she had often made long excursions with each of them on foot, on horseback, in caiques, that she had had them to dinner, separately, on many occasions in a little pavilion which stood at the end of her husband's garden and looked upon the Bosporus. These dinners had frequently taken place when her husband was away from home. Monsieur Dumeny was a good musician and had sometimes sung and played to her till late in the night. Hadi Bey had sometimes been her guide in Constantinople and had given to her the freedom of his strange and mysterious city of Stamboul. With him she had visited the mosques, with him she had explored the bazaars, with him she had sunk down in the strange and enveloping melancholy of the vast Turkish cemeteries which are protected by forests of cypresses. All this she acknowledged without the least discomposure. One of her remarks to the cross-examining counsel was this:

"You suggest that I have been very imprudent. I answer that I am not able to live what the conventional call a prudent life. Such a life would be a living death to me."

"Kindly confine yourself to answering my questions," retorted Counsel harshly. "I suggest that you were far more than imprudent. I suggest that when you and Hadi Bey remained together in that pavilion on the Bosporus until midnight, until after midnight, you——" and then followed another hideous accusation, which, gazing with her observant eyes at the brick-red shaven face of her accuser, Mrs. Clarke quietly denied. She never showed temper. Now and then she gave indications of a sort of cold disgust or faint surprise. But there were no outraged airs of virtue. A slight disdain was evidently more natural to the temperament of this woman than any fierceness of protestation. Once when Counsel said, "I shall ask the jury to infer"—something abominable, Mrs. Clarke tranquilly rejoined:

"Whatever they infer it won't alter the truth."

Daventry moved his shoulders. Dion was certain that he considered this remark ill-advised. The jury, however, at whom Mrs. Clarke gazed in the short silence which followed, seemed, Dion thought, impressed by her firmness. The luncheon interval prevented Counsel from saying anything further just then, and Mrs. Clarke stepped down from the box.

"Isn't she wonderful?"

Dion heard this murmur, which did not seem to be addressed to any particular person. It had come from Mrs. Chetwinde, who now got up and went to speak to Mrs. Clarke. The whole court was in movement. Dion went out to have a hasty lunch with Daventry.

"A pity she said that!" Daventry said in a low voice to Dion, hitching up his gown. "Juries like to be deferred to."

"I believe she impressed them by her independence."

"Do you, though? She's marvelously intelligent. Perhaps she knows more of men, even of jurymen, than I do."

At lunch they discussed the case. Daventry had had two or three chances given to him by Sir John Addington, and thought he had done quite well.

"Do you think Mrs. Clarke will win?" said Dion.

"I know she's innocent, but I can't tell. She's so infernally unconventional and a jury's so infernally conventional that I can't help being afraid."

Dion thought of his Rosamund's tranquil wisdom.

"I think Mrs. Clarke's very clever," he said. "But I suppose she isn't very wise."

"I'll tell you what it is, old Dion; she prefers life to wisdom."

"Well, but——" Dion Began.

But he stopped. Now he knew Mrs. Clarke a little better, from her own evidence, he knew just what Daventry meant. He looked upon the life of unwisdom, and he was able to feel its fascination. There were scents in it that lured, and there were colors that tempted; in its night there was music; about it lay mystery, shadows, and silver beams of the moon shining between cypresses like black towers. It gave out a call to which, perhaps, very few natures of men were wholly deaf. The unwise life! Almost for the first time Dion considered it with a deep curiosity.

He considered it more attentively, more curiously, during the afternoon, when Mrs. Clarke's cross-examination was continued.

It was obvious that during this trial two women were being presented to the judge and jury, the one a greedy and abominably secret and clever sensualist, who hid her mania beneath a cloak of intellectuality, the other a genuine intellectual, whose mental appetites far outweighed the appetites of her body, who was, perhaps, a sensualist, but a sensualist of the spirit and not of the flesh. Which of these two women was the real Cynthia Clarke? The jury would eventually give their decision, but it might not be in accordance with fact. Meanwhile, the horrible unclothing process was ruthlessly proceeded with. But already Dion was becoming accustomed to it. Perhaps Mrs. Clarke's self-possession helped him to assimilate the nauseous food which was offered to him.

Beadon Clarke was in court, and had been pointed out to Dion, an intellectual and refined-looking man, bald, with good features, and a gentle, but now pained, expression; obviously a straight and aristocratic fellow. Beside him sat his mother, that Lady Ermyntrude who, it was said, had forced on the trial. She sat upright, her eyes fixed on her daughter-in-law, a rather insignificant small woman, not very well dressed, young looking, with hair done exactly in Queen Alexandra's way, and crowned with a black toque.

Dion noticed that she had a very firm mouth and chin. She did not look actively hostile as she gazed at the witness, but merely attentive—deeply, concentratedly attentive. Mrs. Clarke never glanced towards her.

Perhaps, whatever Lady Ermyntrude had believed hitherto, she was now beginning to wonder whether her conception of her son's wife had been a wrong one, was beginning to ask herself whether she had divined the nature of the soul inhabiting the body which now stood up before her.

About an hour before the close of the sitting the heat in the court became almost suffocating, and the Judge told Mrs. Clarke she might continue her evidence sitting down. She refused this favor.

"I'm not at all tired, my lord," she said.

"She's made of iron," Mrs. Chetwinde murmured to Dion. "Though she generally looks like a corpse. She was haggard even as a girl."

"Did you know her then?" he whispered.

"I've known her all my life."

Daventry wiped his brow with a large pocket-handkerchief, performing the action legally. One of the jurymen, who was too fat, and had something of the expression of a pug dog, opened his mouth and rolled slightly in his seat. The cross-examination became with every moment more disagreeable. Beadon Clarke never lifted his eyes from his knees. All the women in court, except Mrs. Chetwinde and Mrs. Clarke, were looking strangely alive and conscious. Dion had forgotten everything except Stamboul and the life of unwisdom. Suppose Mrs. Clarke had lived the life imputed to her by Counsel, suppose she really were a consummately clever and astoundingly ingenious humbug, driven, as many human beings are driven, by a dominating vice which towered over her life issuing commands she had not the strength to resist, how had it profited her? Had she had great rewards in it? Had she been led down strange ways guided by fascination bearing the torch from which spring colored fires? Good women sometimes, perhaps oftener than many people realize, look out of the window and try to catch a glimpse of the world of the wicked women, asking themselves, "Is it worth while? Is their time so much better than mine? Am I missing—missing?" And they shut the window—for fear. Far away, turning the corner of some dark alley, they have seen the colored gleam of the torch.

Rosamund would never do that—would never even want to do that. She was not one of the good women who love to take just a peep at evil "because one ought to know something of the trials and difficulties of those less fortunately circumstanced than oneself."

But, for the moment, Dion had quite forgotten his Rosamund. She was in England, but he was in Stamboul, hearing the waters of the Bosporus lapping at the foot of Mrs. Clarke's garden pavilion, while Dumeny played to her as the moon came up to shine upon the sweet waters of Asia; or sitting under the plane trees of the Pigeon Mosque, while Hadi Bey showed her how to write an Arabic love-letter—to somebody in the air, of course. In this trial he felt the fascination of Constantinople as he had never felt it when he was in Constantinople; but he felt, too, that only those who strayed deliberately from the beaten paths could ever capture the full fascination of the divided city, which looks to Europe and to Asia, and is set along the way of the sea.

Whether innocent or guilty, Mrs. Clarke had certainly done that. He watched her with a growing interest. How very much she must know that he did not know. Then he glanced at Hadi Bey, who still sat up alertly, who still looked bright and vivid, intelligent, ready for anything, a man surely with muscles of steel and a courageous robust nature, and at Aristide Dumeny. Upon the latter his eyes rested for a long time. When at last he again looked at Mrs. Clarke he had formed the definite impression that Dumeny was corrupt—an interesting man, a clever, probably a romantic as well as a cynical man, but certainly corrupt.

Didn't that tell against Mrs. Clarke?

She was now being questioned about a trip at night in a caique with Hadi Bey down the sweet waters of Asia where willows lean over the stream. Mrs. Chetwinde's pale eyes were fastened upon her. Beadon Clarke bent his head a little lower as, in her husky voice, his wife said that he knew of the expedition, had apparently smiled upon her unconventionalities, knowing how entirely free she was from the ugly bias towards vice attributed to her by Counsel.

Lady Ermyntrude Clarke shot a glance at her son, and her firm mouth became firmer.

The willows bent over the sweet waters in the warm summer night; the Albanian boatmen were singing.

"She must have had wonderful times!"

The whisper came from an unseen woman sitting just behind Dion. His mind echoed the thought she had expressed. Now the Judge was rising from the bench and bowing to the Court; Mrs. Clarke was stepping down from the witness-box; Dumeny, his eyes half closed, was brushing his shining silk hat with the sleeve of his coat; Beadon Clarke was leaning to speak to his mother.

The Court was adjourned.

As Dion got up he felt the heat as if it were heat from a furnace. His face and his body were burning.

"Come and speak to Cynthia, and take us to tea somewhere—can you?" said Mrs. Chetwinde.

"Of course, with pleasure."

"Your Rosamund——?"

Her eyes were on him for a moment.

"She won't expect me at any particular time."

"Mr. Daventry can come too."

Dion never forgot their difficult exit from the court. It made him feel ashamed for humanity, for the crowd which frantically pressed to stare at a woman because perhaps she had done things which were considered by all right-minded people to be disgusting. Mrs. Clarke and her little party of friends had to be helped away by the police. When at length they were driving away towards Claridge's Hotel, Dion was able once more to meet the eyes of his companions, and again he was amazed at the self-possession of Mrs. Clarke. Really she seemed as composed, as completely mistress of herself, as when he had first seen her standing near the statue of Echo in the drawing-room of Mrs. Chetwinde.

"You haven't been in court before to-day, have you?" she said to Dion.

"No."

"Why did you come to-day?"

"Well, I——" He hesitated. "I promised Mr. Daventry to come to-day."

"That was it!" said Mrs. Clarke, and she looked out of the window.

Dion felt rather uncomfortable as he spoke to Mrs. Chetwinde and left further conversation with Mrs. Clarke to Daventry; but when they were all in a quiet corner of the tearoom at Claridge's, a tea-table before them and a band playing softly at a distance, he was more at his ease. The composure of Mrs. Clarke perhaps conveyed itself to him. She spoke of the case quite naturally, as a guilty woman surely could not possibly have spoken of it—showing no venom, making no attack upon her accusers.

"It's all a mistake," she said, "arising out of stupidity, out of the most widespread and, perhaps, the most pitiable and dangerous lack in human nature."

"And what's that?" asked Daventry, rather eagerly.

"I expect you know."

He shook his head.

"Don't you?" she asked of Dion, spreading thinly some butter over a piece of dry toast.

"I'm afraid I don't."

"Cynthia means the lack of power to read character, the lack of psychological instinct," drifted from the lips of Mrs. Chetwinde.

"Three-quarters of the misunderstandings and miseries of the world come from that," said Mrs. Clarke, looking at the now buttered toast. "If my mother-in-law and my husband had any psychological faculty they would never have mistaken my unconventionality, which I shall never give up, for common, and indeed very vulgar, sinfulness."

"Confusing the pastel with the oleograph," dropped out Mrs. Chetwinde, looking abstractedly at an old red woman in a turret of ostrich plumes, who was spread out on the other side of the room before a plate of cakes.

"You are sure Lady Ermyntrude didn't understand?" said Daventry, with a certain sharp legality of manner.

"You mean that she might be wicked instead of only stupid?"

"Well, yes. I suppose it does come to that."

"Believe me, Mr. Daventry, she's a quite honest stupid woman. She honestly thinks that I'm a horrible creature."

And Mrs. Clarke began to bite the crisp toast with her lovely teeth. Mrs. Chetwinde's eyes dwelt on her for a brief instant with, Dion thought, a rather peculiar look which he could not quite understand. It had, perhaps, a hint of hardness, or of cold admiration, something of that kind, in it.

"Tell me some more about the baby," was Mrs. Clarke's next remark, addressed to Dion. "I want to get away for a minute into a happy domestic life. And yours is that, I know."

How peculiarly haggard, and yet how young she looked as she said that! She added:

"If the case ends as I feel sure it will, I hope your wife and I shall get to know each other. I hear she's the most delightful woman in London, and extraordinarily beautiful. Isn't she?"

"I think she is beautiful," Dion said simply.

And then they talked about Robin, while Mrs. Chetwinde and Daventry discussed some question of the day. Before they parted Dion could not help saying:

"I want to ask you something."

"Yes?"

"Why do you feel sure that the trial will end as it ought to end? Surely the lack of the psychological instinct is peculiarly abundant—if a lack can be abundant!"—he smiled, almost laughed, a little deprecatingly—"in a British jury?"

"And so you think they're likely to go wrong in their verdict?"

"Doesn't it rather follow?"

She stared at him, and her eyes were, or looked, even more widely opened than usual. After a long pause she said;

"You wish to frighten me."

She got up, and began to draw on her dove-colored Swedish kid gloves.

"Tippie," she said to Mrs. Chetwinde, "I must go home now and have a little rest."

Only then did Dion realize how marvelously she was bearing a tremendous strain. He began to admire her prodigiously.

When he said good-by to her under the great porch he couldn't help asking:

"Are your nerves of steel?"

She leaned forward in the brougham.

"If your muscles are of iron."

"My muscles!" he said.

"Haven't you educated them?"

"Oh—yes."

"And perhaps I've educated my nerves."

Mrs. Chetwinde's spirited horses began to prance and show temper. Mrs. Clarke sat back. As the carriage moved away, Dion saw Mrs. Chetwinde's eyes fixed upon him. They looked at that moment not at all vague. If they had not been her eyes, he would have been inclined to think them piercing. But, of course, Mrs. Chetwinde's eyes could never be that.

"How does one educate one's nerves, Guy?" asked Dion, as the two friends walked away.

"By being defendant in a long series of divorce cases, I should say."

"Has Mrs. Clarke ever been in another case of this kind?"

"Good heavens, no. If she had, even I couldn't believe in her innocence, as I do now."

"Then where did she get her education?"

"Where do women get things, old Dion? It seems to me sometimes straight from God, and sometimes straight from the devil."

Dion's mental comment on this was, "What about Mrs. Clarke?" But he did not utter it.

Before he left Daventry, he was pledged to be in court on the last day of the case, when the verdict would be given. He wished to go to the court again on the morrow, but the thought of Rosamund decided him not to do this; he would, he knew, feel almost ashamed in telling her that the divorce court, at this moment, fascinated him, that he longed, or almost longed, to follow the colored fires of a certain torch down further shadowy alleys of the unwise life. He felt quite sure that Mrs. Clarke was an innocent woman, but she had certainly been very unconventional indeed in her conduct. He remembered the almost stern strength in her husky voice when she had said "my unconventionality, which I shall never give up." So even this hideous and widely proclaimed scandal would not induce her to bow in the future before the conventional gods. She really was an extraordinary woman. What would Rosamund think of her? If she won her case she evidently meant to know Rosamund. Of course, there could be nothing against that. If she lost the case, naturally there could never be any question of such an acquaintance; he knew instinctively that she would never suggest it. Whatever she was, or was not, she was certainly a woman of the world.

That evening, when he reached home, he found Rosamund sitting in the nursery in the company of Robin and the nurse. The window was partially open. Rosamund believed in plenty of air for her child, and no "cosseting"; she laughed to scorn, but genially, the nurse's prejudice against "the night air."

"My child," she said, "must get accustomed to night as well as day, Nurse—and the sooner the better." So now "Master Robin" was played upon by a little wind from Westminster. He seemed in no way alarmed by it. This evening he was serene, and when his father entered the room he assumed his expression of mild inquiry, vaguely agitated his small rose-colored fists, and blew forth a welcoming bubble.

Dion was touched at the sight.

"Little rogue!" he said, bending over Robin. "Little, little rogue!"

Robin raised his, as yet scarcely defined, eyebrows, stared tremendously hard at the nursery atmosphere, pulled out his wet lips and gurgled, at the same time wagging his head, now nicely covered with silky fair hair, or down, whichever you chose to call it.

"He knows his papa, ma'am, and that he does, a boy!" said the nurse, who approved of Dion, and had said below stairs that he was "as good a husband as ever wore shoe-leather."

"Of course he does," said Rosamund softly. "Babies have plenty of intelligence of a kind, and I think it's a darling kind."

Dion sat down beside her, and they both bent over Robin in the gathering twilight, while the nurse went softly out of the room.

Dion had quite forgotten the Clarke case.



CHAPTER V

Three days later Daventry called in Little Market Street early, and was shown into the dining-room where he found Rosamund alone at the breakfast-table.

"Do forgive me for bursting in upon the boiled eggs," he said, looking unusually excited. "I'm off almost directly to the Law Courts and I want to take Dion with me. It's the last day of Mrs. Clarke's case. We expect the verdict some time this evening. I dare say the court will sit late. Where's Dion?"

"He's just coming down. We were both disturbed in the night, so we slept later than usual."

"Disturbed? Burglars? Fire?"

"No; Robin's not at all well."

"I say! I'm sorry for that. What is it?"

"He's had a very bad throat and been feverish, poor little chap. But I think he's better this morning. The doctor came."

"You'll never be one of the fussy mothers."

"I hope not," she said, rather gravely; "I'm not fond of them. Here's Dion."

Daventry sat with them while they breakfasted, and Dion agreed to keep his promise and go to the court.

"I told Uncle Biron I must be away from business to hear the summing-up," he said. "I'll send a telegram to the office. Do you think it will be all right for Mrs. Clarke?"

"She's innocent, but nobody can say. It depends so much on the summing-up."

Dion glanced at Rosamund.

"You mustn't think I'm going to turn into an idler, Rose. This is a very special occasion."

"I know. Mr. Daventry's first case."

"Haven't you followed it at all?" Daventry asked.

She shook her head.

"No, but I've been wished you well all the same."

When the two men got up to go, Dion said:

"Rosamund!"

"What is it?"

"If Mrs. Clarke wins and is completely exonerated, I think she would like very much to make your acquaintance."

Rosamund looked surprised.

"What makes you think so?"

"Well, she said something to that effect the other day."

"She's a very interesting, clever woman," interposed Daventry, with sudden warmth.

"I'm sure she is. We must see. It's very kind of her. Poor woman! What dreadful anxiety she must be in to-day! You'll all be glad when it's over."

When the two friends were out in the sunshine, walking towards the Strand, Daventry said:

"Why is your wife against Mrs. Clarke?"

"She isn't. What makes you thinks so?"

"I'm quite sure she doesn't want to know her, even if she gets the verdict."

"Well, of course all this sort of thing is—it's very far away from Rosamund."

"You don't mean to say you doubt Mrs. Clarke?"

"No, but——"

"Surely if she's innocent she's as good as any other woman."

"I know, but——I suppose it's like this: there are different ways of being good, and perhaps Mrs. Clarke's way isn't Rosamund's. In fact, we know it isn't."

Daventry said nothing more on the subject; he began to discuss the case in all its bearings, and presently dwelt upon the great power English judges have over the decisions of juries.

"Mrs. Clarke gave her evidence splendidly on the whole," he said. "And Hadi Bey made an excellent impression. My one fear is that fellow Aristide Dumeny. You didn't hear him, but, of course, you read his evidence. He was perfectly composed and as clever as he could be in the box, but I'm sure, somehow, the jury were against him."

"Why?"

"I hardly know. It may be something in his personality."

"I believe he's a beast," said Dion.

"There!" exclaimed Daventry, wrinkling his forehead. "If the Judge thinks as you do it may just turn things against us."

"Why did she make a friend of the fellow?"

"Because he's chock-full of talent and knowledge, and she loves both. Dion, my boy, the mind can play the devil with us as well as the body. But I hope—I hope for the right verdict. Anyhow I've done well, and shall get other cases out of this. The odd thing is that Mrs. Clarke's drained me dry of egoism. I care only to win for her. I couldn't bear to see her go out of court with a ruined reputation. My nerves are all on edge. If Mrs. Clarke loses, how d'you think she'll take it?"

"Standing up."

"I expect you're right. But I don't believe I shall take it standing. Perhaps some women make us men feel for them more than they feel for themselves. Don't look at me in court whatever you do."

They had arrived at the Law Courts. He hurried away.

Dion's place was again beside Mrs. Chetwinde, who looked unusually alive, and whose vagueness had been swept away by something—anxiety for her friend, perhaps, or the excitement of following day after day an unusually emotional cause celebre.

Now, as Sir John Addington stood up to continue his speech on Mrs. Clarke's behalf, begun on the previous day, Mrs. Chetwinde leaned forward and fixed her eyes upon him, closing her fingers tightly on the fan she had brought with her.

Sir John spoke with an earnestness and conviction which at certain moments rose almost to passion, as he drew the portrait of a woman whose brilliant mind and innocent nature had led her into the unconventional conduct which her enemies now asserted were wickedness. Beadon Clarke's counsel had suggested that Mrs. Clarke was an abominable woman, brilliantly clever, exquisitely subtle, who had chosen as an armor against suspicion a bold pretense of simplicity and harmless unconventionality, but who was the prey of a hidden and ungovernable vice. He, Sir John, ventured to put forward for the jury's careful examination a very different picture. He made no secret of the fact that, from the point of view of the ordinary unconventional man or woman, Mrs. Clarke had often acted unwisely, and, with not too fine a sarcasm, he described for the jury the average existence of "a careful drab woman" in the watchful and eternally gossiping diplomatic world. Then he contrasted with it the life led by Mrs. Clarke in the wonderful city of Stamboul—a life "full of color, of taste, of interest, of charm, of innocent, joyous and fragrant liberty. Which of us," he demanded, "would not in our souls prefer the latter life to the former? Which of us did not secretly long for the touch of romance, of strangeness, of beauty, to put something into our lives which they lacked? But we have not the moral courage to break our prison doors and to emerge into the nobler world."

"The dull, the drab, the platter-faced and platter-minded people," he said, in a passage which Dion was always to remember, "who go forever bowed down beneath the heavy yoke of convention, are too often apt to think that everything charming, everything lively, everything unusual, everything which gives out, like sweet incense, a delicate aroma of strangeness, must be, somehow, connected with wickedness. Everything which deviates from their pattern must deviate towards the devil, according to them; every step taken away from the beaten path must be taken towards ultimate destruction. They have no conception of intimacies between women and men cemented not by similar lusts and similar vices, but by similar intellectual tastes and similar aspirations towards beauty. In color such people always find blackness, in gaiety wickedness, in liberty license, in the sacred intimacies of the soul the hateful vices of the body. But you, gentlemen of the jury——"

His appeal to the twelve in the box at this moment was, perhaps, scarcely convincing. He addressed them as if, like Mrs. Clarke and himself, they were enamored of the unwise life, which is only unwise because we live in a world of censorious fools, and as if he knew it. The strange thing was that the jury were evidently impressed if not carried away, by his appeal. They sat forward, stared at Sir John as if fascinated, and even began to assume little airs which were almost devil-may-care. But when, with a precise and deliberately cold acuteness, Sir John turned to the evidence adverse to his client, and began to tear it to shreds, they stared less, frowned, and showed by their expressions their efforts to be legal.

As soon as Sir John had finished his speech, the Court rose for the luncheon interval.

"Are you going out?" said Mrs. Chetwinde to Dion. "I've brought some horrible little sandwiches, and I shan't stir."

"I'm not hungry. I'll stay with you."

He sighed.

"What a crowd!" he said, looking over the sea of hot, staring faces. "How horrid people look sometimes!"

"When they're feeling cruel."

She began to eat her sandwiches, which were tightly packed in a small silver box.

"Isn't Mrs. Clarke coming to-day?" Dion asked.

"Yes. I expect her in a moment. Esme Darlington is bringing her."

"Mr. Darlington?"

"You're surprised?"

"Well, I should hardly have expected somehow that—I don't know."

"I do. But Esme Darlington's more of a man than he seems. And he's thoroughly convinced of Cynthia's innocence. Here they are."

There was a stir in the crowd. Many women present rustled as they turned in their seats; some stood up and craned forward; people in the gallery leaned over, looking eagerly down; a loud murmur and a wide hiss of whispering emphasized the life in the court. The tall, loose-limbed figure of Esme Darlington, looking to-day singularly dignified and almost impressive, pushed slowly forward, followed by the woman whose social fate was so soon to be decided.

Mrs. Clarke glanced round over the many faces without any defiance as she made her way with difficulty to a seat beside her solicitor. The lack of defiance in her expression struck Dion forcibly. This woman did not seem to be mentally on the defensive, did not seem to be wishing to repel the glances, fierce with curiosity, which were leveled at her from all sides. Apparently she had no fear at all of bristling bayonets. Her haggard face was unsmiling, not cold, but intense with a sort of living calm which was surely not a mask. She looked at Mrs. Chetwinde and at Dion as she passed near to them, giving them no greeting except with her large eyes which obviously recognized them. In a moment she was sitting down between her solicitor and Esme Darlington.

"It will quite break Guy Daventry up if she doesn't get the verdict," said Dion in an uneven voice to Mrs. Chetwinde.

"Mr. Daventry?" she said, with an odd little stress of emphasis on the name.

"Of course I should hate it too. Any man who feels a woman is innocent—"

He broke off. She said nothing, and went on eating her little sandwiches as if she rather disliked them.

"Mrs. Chetwinde, do tell me. I believe you've got an extraordinary flair—will she win?"

"My dear boy, now how can I know?"

Dion felt very young for a minute.

"I want to know what you expect."

Mrs. Chetwinde closed the small silver box with a soft snap.

"I fully expect her to win."

"Because she's innocent?"

"Oh no. That's no reason in a world like this, unfortunately."

"But, then, why?"

"Because Cynthia always does get what she wants, or needs. She has quite abnormal will-power, and will-power is the conqueror. If I'm to tell you the truth, I see only one reason for doubt, I don't say fear, as to the result."

"Can you tell me what it is?"

"Aristide Dumeny."

At this moment the Judge returned to the bench. An hour later he began to sum up.

He spoke very slowly and rather monotonously, and at first Dion thought that he was going to be "let down" by this almost cruelly level finale to a dramatic, sometimes even horrible, struggle between powerful opposing forces. But presently he began to come under a new fascination, the fascination of a cool and very clear presentation of undressed facts. Led by the Judge, he reviewed again the complex life at Constantinople, he followed again Mrs. Clarke's many steps away from the beaten paths, he penetrated again through some of the winding ways into the shadows of the unwise life. And he began to wonder a little and a little to fear for the woman who was sitting so near to him waiting for the end. He could not tell whether the Judge believed her to be innocent or guilty, but he thought he could tell that the Judge considered her indiscreet, too heedless of those conventions on which social relations are based, too determined a follower after the flitting light of her own desires. Presently the position of Beadon Clarke in the Constantinople menage was touched upon, and suddenly Dion found himself imagining how it would be to have as his wife a Mrs. Clarke. Suppose Rosamund were to develop the unconventional idiosyncrasies of a Cynthia Clarke? He realized at once that he was not a Beadon Clarke; he could never stand that sort of thing. He felt hot at the mere thought of his Rosamund making night expeditions in caiques alone with young men—such, for instance, as Hadi Bey; or listening alone at midnight in a garden pavilion isolated, shaded by trees, to the music made by a Dumeny.

Dumeny! The Judge pronounced his name.

"I come now to the respondent's relation with the second co-respondent, Aristide Dumeny of the French Embassy in Constantinople."

Dion leaned slightly forward and looked at Dumeny. Dumeny was sitting bolt upright, and now, as the Judge mentioned his name, he folded his arms, raised his long dark eyes, and gazed steadily at the bench. Did he know that he was the danger in the case? If he did he did not show any apprehension. His white face, typically French, with its rather long nose, slightly flattened temples, faintly cynical and ironic lips and small but obstinate chin, was almost sinister in its complete immobility.

"He's certainly a corrupt beast," Dion said to himself. "But as certainly he's an interesting, clever, knowledgeable beast."

Dumeny's very thick, glossy, and slightly undulating dark hair, growing closely round his low forehead, helped to make him almost romantically handsome, although his features were rather irregular. His white ears were abnormally small, Dion noticed.

The Judge went with cold minuteness into every detail of Dumeny's intimacy with Mrs. Clarke that had been revealed in the trial, and dwelt on the link of music which, it was said, had held them together.

"Music stimulates the passions, and may, in highly sensitive persons, generate impulses not easy to control, provided that the situation in which such persons find themselves, when roused and stirred, is propitious. It has been given in evidence that Monsieur Dumeny frequently played and sang to the respondent till late in the night in the pavilion which has been described to you. You have seen Monsieur Dumeny in the box, and can judge for yourselves whether he was a man likely to avail himself of any advantage his undoubted talents may have given him with a highly artistic and musical woman."

There was nothing striking in the words, but to Dion the Judge's voice seemed slightly changed as it uttered the last sentence. Surely a frigid severity had crept into it, surely it was colored with a faint, but definite, contempt. Several of the jury started narrowly at Aristide Dumeny, and the foreman, with a care and precision almost ostentatious, took a note.

The Judge continued his analysis of Mrs. Clarke's intimacy with Dumeny. He was scrupulously fair; he gave full weight to the mutual attraction which may be born out of common intellectual tastes—an attraction possibly quite innocent, quite free from desire of anything but food for the brain, the subtler emotions, and the soul "if you like to call it so, gentlemen." But, somehow, he left upon the mind of Dion, and probably upon the minds of many others, an impression that he, the Judge, was doubtful as to the sheer intellectuality of Monsieur Dumeny, was not convinced that he had reached that condition of moral serenity and purification in which a rare woman can be happily regarded as a sort of disembodied spirit.

When the Judge at length finished with Dumeny and Dumeny's relations with Mrs. Clarke, Dion felt very anxious about the verdict. The Judge had not succeeded in making him believe that Mrs. Clarke was a guilty woman, but he feared that the jury had been made doubtful. It was evident to him that the Judge had a bad opinion of Dumeny, and had conveyed his opinion to the jury. Was the unwisdom of Mrs. Clarke to prove her undoing? Esme Darlington was pulling his ducal beard almost nervously. A faint hum went through the densely packed court. Mrs. Chetwinde moved and used her fan for a moment. Dion did not dare to look at Guy Daventry. He was realizing, with a sort of painful sharpness, how great a change a verdict against Mrs. Clarke must make in her life.

Her boy, perhaps, probably indeed, would be taken from her. She had only spoken to him casually about her boy, but he had felt that the casual reference did not mean that she had a careless heart. The woman whose hand had held his for a moment would be tenacious in love. He felt sure of that, and sure that she loved her naughty boy with a strong vitality.

When the Judge had finished his task and the jury retired to consider their verdict, it was past four o'clock.

"What do you think?" Dion said in a low voice to Mrs. Chetwinde.

"About the summing-up?"

"Yes."

"It has left things very much as I expected. Any danger there is lies in Monsieur Dumeny."

"Do you know him?"

"Oh, yes. I stayed with Cynthia once in Constantinople. He took us about."

She made no further comment on Monsieur Dumeny.

"I wonder whether the jury will be away long?" Dion said, after a moment.

"Probably. I shan't be at all surprised if they can't agree. Then there will be another trial."

"How appalling!"

"Yes, it wouldn't be very nice for Cynthia."

"I can't help wishing——"

He paused, hesitating.

"Yes?" said Mrs. Chetwinde, looking about the court.

"I can't help wishing Mrs. Clarke hadn't been unconventional in quite such a public way."

A faint smile dawned and faded on Mrs. Chetwinde's lips and in her pale eyes.

"The public method's often the safest in the end," she murmured.

Then she nodded to Esme Darlington, who presently got up and managed to make his way to them. He, too, thought the jury would probably disagree, and considered the summing-up rather unfavorable to Mrs. Clarke.

"People who live in the diplomatic world live in a whispering gallery," he said, bending down, speaking in an under-voice and lifting and lowering his eyebrows. "I told Cynthia so when she married. I ventured to give her the benefit of my—if I may say so—long and intimate knowledge of diplomatic life and diplomatists. I said to her, 'Remember you can always be under observation.' Ah, well—one can only hope the jury will take the right view. But how can we expect British shopkeepers, fruit brokers, cigar merchants, and so forth to understand a—really, one can only say—a wild nature like Cynthia's? It's a wild mind—I'd say this before her!—in an innocent body, just that."

He pulled almost distractedly at his beard with bony fingers, and repeated plaintively:

"A wild mind in an innocent body—h'm, ha!"

"If only Mr. Grundy can be brought to comprehension of such a phenomenon!" murmured Mrs. Chetwinde.

It was obvious to Dion that his two friends feared for the result.

The Judge had left the bench. An hour passed by, and the chime of a clock striking five dropped down coolly, almost frostily, to the hot and curious crowd. Mrs. Clarke sat very still. Esme Darlington had returned to his place beside her, and she spoke to him now and then. Hadi Bey wiped his handsome rounded brown forehead with a colored silk handkerchief; and Aristide Dumeny, with half-closed eyes, ironically examined the crowd, whispered to a member of his Embassy who had accompanied him into court, folded his arms and sat looking down. Beadon Clarke's face was rigid, and a fierce red, like the red of a blush of shame, was fixed on his cheeks. His mother had pulled a thick black veil with a pattern down over her face, and was fidgeting perpetually with a chain of small moonstones set in gold which hung from her throat to her waist. Daventry, blinking and twitching, examined documents, used his handkerchief, glanced at his watch, hitched his gown up on his shoulders, looked at Mrs. Clarke and looked away.

Uneasiness, like a monster, seemed crouching in the court as in a lair.

At a quarter-past five, the Judge returned to the bench. He had received a communication from the jury, who filed in, to say, through their foreman, that they could not agree upon a verdict. A parley took place between the foreman and the Judge, who made inquiry about their difficulties, answered two questions, and finally dismissed them to further deliberations, urging them strongly to try to arrive at an unanimous conclusion.

"I am willing to stay here till nightfall," he said, in a loud and almost menacing voice, "if there is any chance of a verdict."

The jury, looking weary, harassed and very hot, once more disappeared, the Judge left the bench, and the murmuring crowd settled down to another period of waiting.

To Dion it seemed that a great tragedy was impending. Already Mrs. Clarke had received a blow. The fact that the jury had publicly announced their disagreement would be given out to all the world by the newspapers, and must surely go against Mrs. Clarke even if she got a verdict ultimately.

"Do you think there is any chance still?" he said to Mrs. Chetwinde.

"Oh, yes. As I told you, Cynthia always manages to get what she wants."

"I shouldn't think she can ever have wanted anything so much as she wants the right verdict to-day."

"I don't know that," Mrs. Chetwinde replied, with a rather disconcerting dryness.

She was using her fan slowly and monotonously, as if, perhaps, she were trying to make her mind calm by the repetition of a physical act.

"I'm sorry the foreman said they couldn't agree," Dion said, almost in a whisper. "Even if the verdict is for Mrs. Clarke, I'm afraid that will go against her."

"If she wins she wins, and it's all right. Cynthia's not the sort of woman who cares much what the world thinks. The only thing that really matters is what the world does; and if she gets the verdict the world won't do anything—except laugh at Beadon Clarke."

A loud buzz of conversation rose from the court. Presently the light began to fade, and the buzz faded with it; then some lights were turned on, and there was a crescendo of voices. It was possible to see more clearly the multitude of faces, all of them hot, nearly all of them excited and expressive. A great many people were standing, packed closely together and looking obstinate in their determined curiosity. Most of them were either staring at, or were trying to stare at Mrs. Clarke, who was now talking to her solicitor. Esme Darlington was eating a meat lozenge and frowning, evidently discomposed by the jury's dilemma. Lady Ermyntrude Clarke had lifted her veil and was whispering eagerly to her son, bending her head, and emphasizing her remarks with excited gestures which seemed to suggest the energy of one already uplifted by triumph. Beadon Clarke listened with the passivity of a man encompassed by melancholy, and sunk deep in the abyss of shame. Aristide Dumeny was reading a letter which he held with long-fingered, waxen-white hands very near to his narrow dark eyes. His close-growing thick hair looked more glossy now that there was artificial light in the court; from the distance its undulations were invisible, and it resembled a cap of some heavy and handsome material drawn carefully down over his head. Hadi Bey retained his vivid, alert and martial demeanor. He was twisting his mustaches with a muscular brown hand, not nervously, but with a careless and almost a lively air. Many women gazed at him as if hypnotized; they found the fez very alluring. It carried their thoughts to the East; it made them feel that the romance of the East was not very far from them. Some of them wished it very near, and thought of husbands in silk hats, bowlers, and flat caps of Harris tweed with the dawning of a dull distaste. The woman just behind Dion was talking busily to her neighbor. Dion heard her say:

"Some women always manage to have a good time. I wish I was one of them. Dick is a dear, but still——" She whispered for a minute or two; then out came her voice with, "There must be great chances for a woman in the diplomatic world. I knew a girl who married an attache and went to Bucharest. You can have no idea what the Roumanians——" whisper, whisper, whisper.

That woman was envying Mrs. Clarke, it seemed, but surely not envying her innocence. Dion began to be conscious of faint breaths from the furnace of desire, and suddenly he saw the gaunt and sickly-smiling head of hypocrisy, like the flat and tremulously moving head of a serpent, lifted up above the court. Only a little way off Robin, now better, but still "not quite the thing," was lying in his cozy cot in the nursery of No. 5 Little Market Street, with Rosamund sitting beside him. The window to-day, for once, would probably be shut as a concession to Robin's indisposition. A lamp would be burning perhaps. In fancy, Dion saw Rosamund's head lit up by a gentle glow, her hair giving out little gleams of gold, as if fire were caught in its meshes. How was it that her head always suggested to him purity; and not only her purity but the purity of all sweet, sane and gloriously vigorous women—those women who tread firmly, nobly, in the great central paths of life? He did not know, but he was certain that the head of no impure, of no lascivious woman could ever look like his Rosamund's. That nursery, holding little Robin and his mother in the lamplight, was near to this crowded court, but it was very far away too, as far as heaven is from hell. It would be good, presently, to go back to it.

Chime after chime dropped down frostily into the almost rancid heat of the court. Time was sending its warning that night was coming to London.

An epidemic of fidgeting and of coughing seized the crowd, which was evidently beginning to feel the stinging whip of an intense irritation.

"What on earth," said the voice of a man, expressing the thought which bound all these brains together, "what on earth can the jury be up to?"

Surely by now everything for and against Mrs. Clarke must have been discussed ad nauseam. Only the vainest of repetitions could be occupying the time of the jury. People began positively to hate those twelve uninteresting men, torn from their dull occupations to decide a woman's fate. Even Mrs. Chetwinde showed vexation.

"This is really becoming ridiculous," she murmured. "Even twelve fools should know when to give their folly a rest."

"I suppose there must be one or two holding out against all argument and persuasion. Don't you think so?" said Dion, almost morosely.

"I dare say. I know a great deal about individual fools, but very little about them in dozens. The heat is becoming unbearable."

She sighed deeply and moved in her seat, opening and shutting her fan.

"She must be enduring torment," muttered Dion.

"Yes; even Cynthia can hardly be proof against this intolerable delay."

Another dropping down of chimes: eight o'clock! A long murmur went through the crowd. Some one said: "They're coming at last."

Every one moved. Instinctively Dion leant forward to look at Mrs. Clarke. He felt very much excited and nervous, almost as if his own fate were about to be decided. As he looked he saw Mrs. Clarke draw herself up till she seemed taller than usual. She had a pair of gloves in her lap, and she now began to pull one of these gloves on, slowly and carefully, as if she were thinking about what she was doing. The jury filed in looking feverish, irritable and battered. Three or four of them showed piteous and injured expressions. Two others had the peculiar look of obstinate men who have been giving free rein to their vice, indulging in an orgy of what they call willpower. Their faces were, at the same time, implacable and ridiculous, but they walked impressively. The Judge was sent for. Two or three minutes elapsed before he came in. During those minutes there was no coughing and scarcely any moving. The silence in the court was vital. During it, Dion stared hard at the jury and strove to read the verdict in their faces. Naturally he failed. No message came from them to him.

The Judge came back to the bench, looking weary and harsh.

"Do you find that the respondent has been guilty or not guilty of misconduct with the co-respondent, Hadi Bey?" said the clerk of the court.

"We find that the respondent has not been guilty of misconduct with Hadi Bey."

After a slight pause, speaking in a louder voice than before, the clerk of the court said:

"Do you find that the respondent has been guilty or not guilty of misconduct with the co-respondent, Aristide Dumeny?"

"We find that the respondent has not been guilty of misconduct with Aristide Dumeny."

Dion saw the Judge frown.

Slight applause broke out in the court, but it was fitful and uncertain and almost immediately died away.

Mrs. Chetwinde said in a low voice, almost as if to herself:

"Cynthia has got what she wants—again."

Then, after the formalities, the crowd was in movement; the weary and excited people, their curiosity satisfied at last, began to melt away; the young barristers hurried out, eagerly discussing the rights and wrongs of the case; and Mrs. Clarke's adherents made their way to her to offer her their congratulations.

Daventry was triumphant. He shook his client's hand, held it, shook it again, and could scarcely find words to express his excitement and delight. Even Esme Darlington's usual careful serenity was for the moment obscured by an emotion eminently human, as he spoke into Mrs. Clarke's ear the following words of a ripe wisdom:

"Cynthia, my dear, after this do take my advice and live as others live. In a conventional world conventionality is the line of least resistance. Don't turn to the East unless the whole congregation does it."

"I shall never forget your self-sacrifice in facing the crowd with me to-day, dear Esme," was her answer. "I know how much it cost you."

"Oh, as to that, for an old friend—h'm, ha!"

His voice failed in his beard. He drew forth a beautiful Indian handkerchief—a gift from his devoted friend the Viceroy of India—and passed it over a face which looked unusually old.

Mrs. Chetwinde said:

"I expected you to win, Cynthia. It was stupid of the jury to be so slow in arriving at the inevitable verdict. But stupid people are as lethargic as silly ones are swift. How shall we get to the carriage? We can't go out by the public exit. I hear the crowd is quite enormous, and won't move. We must try a side door, if there is one."

Then Dion held Mrs. Clarke's hand, and looked down at her haggard but still self-possessed face. It astonished him to find that she preserved her earnestly observant expression.