Of course she would swear that, the quidnuncs declared, unless she wished to brand herself a murderess; she had come into Court to swear to her innocence; nothing less was to be expected. But it all looked very queer, very ugly: at any moment, it was thought, she might break down in her evidence, and the case be brought to a sudden and dramatic close. But Alexia never faltered, and then the disappointed folk attributed this to her tremendous nerve-power. The woman who could kill one lover and then go and dance with another was not the sort of person to break down in the witness-box. It was not to be expected, even under Macvee’s searching and tricky cross-examination; it simply emphasized her character, and consequently her guilt. So much for the fashionable Ghouls; the smart thirsters for blood. But there was another party, smaller and less noisily insistent, who believed in Alexia; who looked upon her as a high-spirited woman shamefully maligned and accused, the victim as much of a terrible chain of coincidence as of a hateful lust for scandal. In his defence of the Countess, Herriard had, as both he and Gastineau anticipated, a trying task. It required the greatest delicacy and tact during the somewhat drastic cross-examination of his client, to know just when to interfere and how far to protest. In this Gastineau’s advice was golden; he seemed to have the faculty of anticipating everything that would happen; not merely the line the cross-examination would take, but even the very wording of the questions which the rough-tongued Macvee would ask. So Herriard’s championship of his client was, at least on the human side of the case, successful to admiration, notwithstanding that sympathy was largely against him. The craving for scandal and for the downfall of a fair woman is a morbid growth which will eat away the innate sense of chivalry. Fair play is, paradoxically, often a sad spoil-sport: we do not always want the best man to win, and right is usually terribly uninteresting compared with wrong. So there is much satisfaction in seeing wrong established that the spectators may gloat over its punishment. Still, Geoffrey Herriard’s advocacy, plucky yet tactful, was bound to extort approval even from those who were longing to see him trip; it had the unbounded praise of the Countess’s sympathizers and, what he felt he valued still more, the ardent gratitude of Alexia herself. Alexia was, almost literally, fighting for her life; this hideous chance threatened her with, at least, social annihilation, and the very desperation of the fight accentuated her dependence on her defender. Those were terrible days to her, when she was a marked woman, the gazing-stock for every vulgar quidnunc; branded already by the prejudice of the sensation-mongers as, at least, a venial murderess. The words and messages of sympathy she constantly received scarcely sustained her through the ordeal.