ilent."

"Sir, sir," Captain Tremayne turned in wild appeal to the president,
"this is not true." He conceived at once the terrible mistake that Miss
Armytage had made. She must have seen him climb down from Lady O'Moy's
balcony, and she had come to the only possible, horrible conclusion.
"This lady is mistaken, I am ready to--"

"A moment, sir. You are interrupting," the president rebuked.

And then the voice of O'Moy on the note of terrible triumph sounded
again like a trumpet through the long room.

"Ah, but it is the truth at last. We have it now. Her name! Her name!"
he shouted. "Who was this wanton?"

Miss Armytage's answer was as a bludgeon-stroke to his ferocious
exultation.

"Myself. Captain Tremayne was with me."

CHAPTER XVIII FOOL'S MATE

Writing years afterwards of this event--in the rather tedious volume
of reminiscences which he has left us--Major Carruthers ventures the
opinion that the court should never have been deceived; that it should
have perceived at once that Miss Armytage was lying. He argues
this opinion upon psychological grounds, contending that the lady's
deportment in that moment of self-accusation was the very last that
in the circumstances she alleged would have been natural to such a
character as her own.

"Had she indeed," he writes, "been Tremayne's mistress, as she
represented herself, it was not in her nature to have announced it after
the manner in which she did so. She bore herself before us with all the
effrontery of a harlot; and it was well known to most of us that a
more pure, chaste, and modest lady did not live. There was here a
contradiction so flagrant that it should have rendered her falsehood
immediately apparent."

Major Carruthers, of course, is writing in the light of later knowledge,
and even, setting that aside, I am very far from agreeing with his
psychological deduction. Just as a shy man will so overreach himself
in his efforts to dissemble his shyness as to assume an air of positive
arrogance, so might a pure lady who had succumbed as Miss Armytage
pretended, upon finding herself forced to such self-accusation, bear
herself with a boldness which was no more than a mask upon the shame and
anguish of her mind.

And this, I think, was the view that was taken by those present. The
court it was--being composed of honest gentlemen--that felt the shame
which she dissembled. There were the eyes that fell away before the
spurious effrontery of her o