He held forth eloquently on the folly of retrospection, of exaggerating the follies of youth, not only during the drive home, but when they were alone together in the cool dining room, for Sir Thomas was out, and Lady Thorne, not expecting them home so early, had retired for the night; and when he left her in Julie’s hands, unwillingly obeying her behest, her demand, given with feverish energy, that her maid was not to be told that she had been attacked with faintness, he felt a little more at ease about her. Suspect her he did not, except of being one of the most highly strung and sensitive creatures alive. And, being sure that this was so--feeling safe in his unbounded love and trust--she was able to rally. Through all which might happen--even if Paul Naz changed his mind, and followed up his suspicions; if the man who found the bottle of drugged brandy happened to recognize her as the woman he had seen; if "that actress girl" could identify her as the person she passed in the hansom; if, indeed, any scraps of her letters or some old photograph of her had been found among Mercier’s belongings--nothing, she believed, would altogether alienate Vansittart’s love. She clung to the thought; it seemed her one anchor to life. But even as she gradually recovered from the shocks of that awful hour at the theatre, she regained a certain amount of hope. The very pomp and circumstance of her wedding; the accounts in the papers; the laudation of herself, Vansittart, and their respective families--all must surely help to avoid exciting the suspicion that she, the heroine of the glorification, was a whited sepulchre; that she had stolen out by night and, alone in a poor room in a lowly dwelling-house with her lover, had poisoned him and then left him to die. Conscience did not soften the facts of the case. She had to face them in all their unlovely turpitude and deal with them as best she might. But that night when she had to see her own story partly enacted on the stage, and, worse still, hear it commented upon with unconscious brutality by the dramatic critic, Mr. Hunt, seemed the climax, the crisis.