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.