At last Sally had left the court. She could bear
the strain of it no longer.
The thoughts which that incident had given rise to in her mind, had
thrown their shadows upon all her lightness of heart for many days
afterwards. There she had seen the keen acid of implacable justice
separating, with undeviating precision, the dross from the gold. She
had beheld the naked fact of adultery--stripped of all the silk of
glamour, all the velvet of romance which once it had worn--held in
its cringing shame before the unsympathetic eyes of twelve men in
a public court of law. And he who had done it, he who had wrenched
away the silken garments, torn off the folds of velvet and flung the
naked deed before their eyes, was the man into whose keeping she had
given her whole existence.
"You, who admittedly can play with passion at the fringe of
adultery," she heard him crying out as she stole from the court, "do
you expect a jury of men, who know the world, to believe that a mere
scruple has withheld you from giving yourself to the importunate
desires of this man--the co-respondent?"
Was that what he thought of her--was that what he thought she had
done to her shame with him? Sally had cried out these questions to
herself, as he had cried them to the woman; but when that evening,
he asked her in a quiet voice what she had thought of the case, she
had evaded any expression that would disclose the trouble of her
mind.
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