For the first of the three years they passed through an incessant round of amusements, going abroad every few months, once bicycling all through France from North to South and then returning by train, spending a week in Paris.  Their method of living was frugal, and Sally’s demands amounted practically to nothing.  For the whole of that year, Traill had sunned himself in the warm delight of her simplicity.  The years when he was alone had brought with them a certain amount of cynicism, a definite trace of bitterness.  But with Sally, he forgot all that—­threw from his shoulders the years that solitude had added to his age and became the man of thirty-six who still looks youth in the eyes without question.

Then he had shaken himself and awakened to the broad responsibilities of life.  A small case was offered him in the courts.  Such cases he had refused before; now Sally urged him to accept it and he obeyed, looking rather to the future than her immediate prompting.  So began the seriousness of his career as a barrister.  The second year only brought one other small brief with it; but both cases were won.  Then he began to specialize in divorce and finally, contact with a well-known solicitor which had come through the medium of journalism, brought him his first brief in the probate and divorce division.  The case was rather a big one and he was not the leading counsel, but the assistance he gave was deemed of such value, that the next brief from the solicitor was given entirely to him.

Sally came down to the courts and listened to his cross-examination of the woman who against a thousand incriminating circumstances was fighting, with white lips and piteously hunted eyes, to keep her name from the mud into which Traill was striving to drag it.

There she saw the cruelty in him again.  It was impossible for her, listening with every sense taut to the uttermost, to obliterate the personal element, to think that he was merely a machine grinding, in the course of his duty, as the implacable mills crush the yielding grain into the listless powder of flour.

“Didn’t it strike you at all,” he asked the trembling woman, his voice barren of all feeling and edged with biting incredulity.  “Didn’t it strike you at all, when you kissed the co-respondent, that you were betraying your husband’s confidence in you?”

“No, not when I kissed him.  We—­we cared for each other—­I admit to that; but—­but kissing did not seem wrong.”

“You didn’t consider kissing wrong?”

“No.”

“At what point then in your intimate relations with a man—­with the co-respondent in particular—­would you have considered that wrong began and right ended?”

The wretched woman had looked pitiably at the judge.  The judge looked unseeingly before him into the well of the court.

“At what point?” Traill had insisted.

“I don’t know how to say it,” she pleaded feebly.