The thing had the overpowering vitality which evil things seem always to possess, and the woman felt helpless against it; so utterly, so completely helpless that it was useless to protest by any word or gesture.  She could have gotten up and explained the true motive behind this man’s speech; she could have repeated the dialogue in his office; she could have asserted his unspeakable treachery; but she saw with an unerring instinct that against the skill of the man her effort would be wholly useless.  With his resources and his dominating cunning he would not only make her words appear obviously false, but he would make them fasten upon her a malicious intent to injure the man who had undertaken her husband’s defense; and somehow he would be able, she felt, to divert the obliquity and cause it to react upon herself.

This was all clear to her, and like some little trapped creature of the wood that finds escape closed on every side and no longer makes any effort, she remained motionless.

The judge was an honorable man, concerned to accomplish justice and not always misled by an obvious intent.  The proceeding did not please him, but he knew that no benefit, rather a continued injury, would result to the prisoner by forcing the attorney to go on with a case which it was evident that he no longer cared to make any effort to support.  He permitted the man to withdraw.  Then he spoke to the prisoner.

“Have you any other counsel?” he asked.

The prisoner did not look up.  He replied in a low, almost inaudible voice.

“No, Your Honor,” he said.

“Then I shall appoint some one to go on with the case,” and he looked up over the docket before him and out at the few attorneys sitting within the rail.

It was at this moment that the woman, crying silently, without a sound and without moving in her chair, heard behind her the voice which she had heard the evening before, when, as now, at the bottom of the pit, she stood before the shutter of the shop-window.

“Will it be necessary, monsieur le judge?”

It was the same wonderful, moving, heavenly voice.  Every sound in the court-room suddenly ceased.  All eyes were lifted.  And Thompson, sitting beside the district-attorney, saw, standing before the rail in the court-room, the splendid, alluring creature that had called him out of the sordid lobby of the Hotel Markheim and entranced him with an evidence of her favor.  Unconsciously he put up his hand to feel for the bud in the lapel of his coat.  It had remained there — not, as it happened, from her wish, but because he dare not lay the coat aside.

In the interval of intense interest arising at the withdrawal of the attorney from the case the girl had come in unnoticed.  She might have appeared out of the floor.  Her voice was the first indication of her presence.

The judge turned swiftly.  “What do you mean?” he said.