“I imagine not,” said Vodrey.  “Now, when did you come to be perfectly sure that, your husband was the real Priam Farll?”

“It was the night of that day when Mr. Oxford came down to see him.  He told me all about it then.”

“Oh!  That day when Mr. Oxford paid him five hundred pounds?”

“Yes.”

“Immediately Mr. Oxford paid him five hundred pounds you were ready to believe that your husband was the real Priam Farll.  Doesn’t that strike you as excessively curious?”

“It’s just how it happened,” said Alice blandly.

“Now about these moles.  You pointed to the right side of your neck.  Are you sure they aren’t on the left side?”

“Let me think now,” said Alice, frowning.  “When he’s shaving in a morning—­he get up earlier now than he used to—­I can see his face in the looking-glass, and in the looking-glass the moles are on the left side.  So on him they must be on the right side.  Yes, the right side.  That’s it.”

“Have you never seen them except in a mirror, my good woman?” interpolated the judge.

For some reason Alice flushed.  “I suppose you think that’s funny,” she snapped, slightly tossing her head.

The audience expected the roof to fall.  But the roof withstood the strain, thanks to a sagacious deafness on the part of the judge.  If, indeed, he had not been visited by a sudden deafness, it is difficult to see how he would have handled the situation.

“Have you any idea,” Vodrey inquired, “why your husband refuses to submit his neck to the inspection of the court?”

“I didn’t know he had refused.”

“But he has.”

“Well,” said Alice, “if you hadn’t turned me out of the court while he was being examined, perhaps I could have told you.  But I can’t as it is.  So it serves you right.”

Thus ended Alice’s performances.

The Public Captious

The court rose, and another six or seven hundred pounds was gone into the pockets of the celebrated artistes engaged.  It became at once obvious, from the tone of the evening placards and the contents of evening papers, and the remarks in crowded suburban trains, that for the public the trial had resolved itself into an affair of moles.  Nothing else now interested the great and intelligent public.  If Priam had those moles on his neck, then he was the real Priam.  If he had not, then he was a common cheat.  The public had taken the matter into its own hands.  The sturdy common sense of the public was being applied to the affair.  On the whole it may be said that the sturdy common sense of the public was against Priam.  For the majority, the entire story was fishily preposterous.  It must surely be clear to the feeblest brain that if Priam possessed moles he would expose them.  The minority, who talked of psychology and the artistic temperament, were regarded as the cousins of Little Englanders and the direct descendants of pro-Boers.