“Then can I assist you?  Would you have considered it wrong—­having kissed you—­for him to put his arms round you?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“There is all the difference, then, in your mind between a man’s kissing you and putting his arms round you.  All the difference between right and wrong?”

“No, I suppose there isn’t.”

“Then you would not have considered that wrong?”

“No.”

“Would you have considered it wrong to sit on his knee?”

Seeing how her case was weakening—­realizing how he was belittling her scruples—­she had admitted that she would not think it wrong, hoping that the ready admission of that would remedy the effect of her previous indecision.

“Then am I to understand—­” asked Traill with a voice stirred in well-simulated anger, “am I to understand that because you loved the co-respondent, you kissed him, thinking no wrong in it and yet, thinking no wrong in sitting on his knee or having his arms about you, you yet—­loving him—­refused these things in which you saw no harm?  Is that what you wish his lordship and the jury to understand?”

“I—­I—­may have let him put his arms round me—­perhaps I did sit on his knee—­once or twice.”

“Then why,” shouted Traill, “when the last witness affirmed that she had seen you sitting in the drawing-room with the co-respondent’s arm round your neck, did you so vehemently deny it?”

Into the trap she had fallen—­into the trap which with his cold cunning he had laid for her—­and from that moment, rigidly denying her misconduct on her oath before God, the wretched creature was brought on the rack of his questioning to almost every admission but that of adultery.  At last Sally had left the court.  She could bear the strain of it no longer.

The thoughts which that incident had given rise to in her mind, had thrown their shadows upon all her lightness of heart for many days afterwards.  There she had seen the keen acid of implacable justice separating, with undeviating precision, the dross from the gold.  She had beheld the naked fact of adultery—­stripped of all the silk of glamour, all the velvet of romance which once it had worn—­held in its cringing shame before the unsympathetic eyes of twelve men in a public court of law.  And he who had done it, he who had wrenched away the silken garments, torn off the folds of velvet and flung the naked deed before their eyes, was the man into whose keeping she had given her whole existence.

“You, who admittedly can play with passion at the fringe of adultery,” she heard him crying out as she stole from the court, “do you expect a jury of men, who know the world, to believe that a mere scruple has withheld you from giving yourself to the importunate desires of this man—­the co-respondent?”

Was that what he thought of her—­was that what he thought she had done to her shame with him?  Sally had cried out these questions to herself, as he had cried them to the woman; but when that evening, he asked her in a quiet voice what she had thought of the case, she had evaded any expression that would disclose the trouble of her mind.