“I need not tell you the story of the trial that amused all England. You may have read it. Fine ladies asked eagerly for the morning papers then; they enjoyed the ‘Pelham divorce case’ as much as they did a fashionable novel; was necessary as breakfast to them. Men met at their clubs and discussed it--was I guilty or was I not? My portrait, or rather what was a caricature of me, was published in the _Workingmen’s Journal_, every man and woman in England had flung a stone at me, and I was guiltless, innocent as a child at its mother’s breast. “The radical papers made me the text of long articles, written to prove that the English aristocracy were all corrupt and bad; in short, my name was notorious. “I cannot tell you my despair when that trial came off. With fiendish ingenuity, the smallest circumstances were made into mighty proofs against me. Men, strangers to me, came to swear that I had been in the habit of meeting the duke out of doors. The two accidental _rencontres_ I have told you about were sworn to be pre-arranged interviews; every circumstance, the most thrilling actions, were tortured into proofs of deadly crime. “Captain Pierrepont swore to having overheard a conversation between the Duke of Launceston and myself that I swear solemnly never took place. But the strongest witness in my husband’s cause was the footman, George Olte. I cannot sully my lips by telling you what infamous things he said--so cruelly, so wickedly false. The little incident of his finding me in the library was construed into a certain proof of my guilt. God pardon them, one and all! They swore an innocent woman’s fair name away. “I was amazed by the ingenuity displayed, but my surprise reached its height when I heard the eloquent speech made by my husband’s counsel. I wonder that I have faith left in any one thing. I am tempted, when I remember that, to ask myself if all the world is one grand lie, if there be truth, justice, mercy or love out of heaven. “If you had heard him dwell upon my husband’s love for me, the Arcadian happiness of our home before what he chose to call the destroyer entered it. How pathetically he depicted my youth--the force of temptation, my fall, the agony of the injured husband driven to such redress from the laws of his country! If you had heard his appeal to English fathers and brothers! Heaven grant me patience! It was the finest parody of justice I ever heard; it was a caricature, a crying shame, that rose from earth to heaven. “What had I to say in my own defense? Nothing, but that I was innocent. I heard that the Duke of Launceston was so angry that he threatened to shoot Sir Alfred Pelham. Of course, he swore to my entire innocence. But the world must love sin. I think where one believed in me, and thought me cruelly outraged and wronged, one hundred believed in my guilt.