oved one who was more to her than all the world, more, a
thousand times, than her own safety or well-being. Perhaps she overrated
the matter. Owen Davies, Lady Honoria, and even Elizabeth might have
done all they threatened; the first of them, perhaps the first two
of them, certainly would have done so. But still Geoffrey might have
escaped destruction. Public opinion, or the sounder part of it, is
sensibly enough hard to move in such a matter, especially when the
person said to have been wronged is heart and soul on the side of him
who is said to have wronged her.

Moreover there might have been ways out of it, of which she knew
nothing. But surrounded as she was by threatening powers--by Lady
Honoria threatening actions in the Courts on one side, by Owen Davies
threatening exposure on another, by Elizabeth ready and willing to
give the most damning evidence on the third, to Beatrice the worst
consequences seemed an absolutely necessary sequence. Then there was her
own conscience arrayed against her. This particular charge was a lie,
but it was not a lie that she loved Geoffrey, and to her the two things
seemed very much the same thing. Hers was not a mind to draw fine
distinctions in such matters. _Se posuit ut culpabilem_: she "placed
herself as guilty," as the old Court rolls put it in miserable Latin,
and this sense of guilt disarmed her. She did not realise the enormous
difference recognised by the whole civilised world between thought and
act, between disposing mind and inculpating deed. Beatrice looked at the
question more from the scriptural point of view, remembering that in
the Bible such fine divisions are expressly stated to be distinctions
without a difference.

Had she gone to Geoffrey and told him her whole story it is probable
that he would have defied the conspiracy, faced it out, and possibly
come off victorious. But, with that deadly reticence of which women
alone are capable, this she did not and would not do. Sweet loving woman
that she was, she would not burden him with her sorrows, she would bear
them alone--little reckoning that thereby she was laying up a far, far
heavier load for him to carry through all his days.

So Beatrice accepted the statements of the plaintiff's attorney for
gospel truth, and from that false standpoint she drew her auguries.

Oh, she was weary! How lovely was the falling night, see how it brooded
on the seas! and how clear were the waters--there a fish passed by