They afterwards went back from their better state of mind, and renewed their persecution: and this it was that decided us to send Rebecca away for a time from Winchester. A proof of my confidence in her may be seen in this—that I refused to give up the mission work and the cottage so long as there was a hope of her returning to it. I kept a place open for her; and it was not true, as Inspector Borner endeavoured to represent it in Court, that she had fled from fear of discovery, and that the cottage had been hastily closed. It was not given up for some three or four weeks later; and Rebecca herself wrote a letter from Jersey giving detailed advice as to what she thought we had better do, namely, to send “Katie” to one situation, “Emily” to another, and so on: and then, as she said, “Shut up the cottage until better times.” Bearing in mind Rebecca’s solemn promise, made as a reformed woman and a Christian, and then following her to the witness-box on the first day of cross-examination, we can see how terrible was the position in which she was placed. She was ignorant of the old and well-known method of prosecuting Counsel, to take a poor man or woman whose life has been a bad one, all through the past years, and drag out of him or her confessions which the questioner knows well how to use. The questioner knows perfectly well that there are points at which the wretched witness will hesitate, and that he has probably grave reasons for concealing certain facts about which he is asked; and so possibly a falsehood is forced out, and then the prosecutor, in a tone of high and outraged virtue, points out that not one single word of all that that perjured witness says can now be believed. We, Rebecca’s friends, saw the device in advance; we saw the fatal snare laid for her: but she, poor soul! did not. She answered truly as far as she could, until it came to the giving of an address which would have involved _others_ in trouble. Then there flashed across her the promise made in her evil days, and the promise made later from better motives, under her new character. There rose afresh in her mind the desire that those to whom she had given her promise should see that a reclaimed woman would not break her word. She was standing between two oaths—the first, made to her old friends; the second, made in the witness-box, to speak “nothing but the truth.” Reader, were you ever in such a position?—between two solemn promises, both of which you desired to keep, but which were opposed the one to the other? If you ever were, you can feel for this weak young convert to truth, and you can pity her weakness. Yes, she told a lie. She looked across the Court at me with an expression on her pale face which I shall never forget.