she suddenly got up. If he knew that she had followed them, he would
never forgive her. So, in the midst of her misery, she still found
the strength to hope. Jumping up from the bed she stood before her
mirror and began to take off her hat as though she had that moment
returned.

When his knock fell on the door, she forced fear from her voice, drove
eagerness into the place of it, and called him to enter.

The door opened. In the mirror's reflection, she could see him stop
abruptly as he came into the room. With hands still lifted,
extricating the pins from her hat, she turned. His lips were tight
closed, his eyes merciless. So he had looked that day at Apsley when
he had returned to find his sister with her in the dining-room. So
he had directed his gaze upon the woman whom she had heard him
cross-examine in the Law Courts. The suspicion leapt to her mind that
he knew, that he had seen her; but having steeled herself to tell
the lie, she did not attempt, in the sudden moment, to reconstruct
her mind to a hasty admission of the truth. She must tell the lie,
clinging to it through everything.

"Have you only just come in?" he asked.

The tone in his voice seemed to question her right to come in at all.
And she was no actress. Another woman in her place, even knowing all
she knew, suspecting all she did, would have turned to him in
amazement; questioning his right to speak to her like that; covered
her guilt with a cloak of astonished innocence and paraded her injury
before him. Sally took it for granted; did not even argue from it
the certainty that he had seen her. Her mind was made up for the lie
and she did not possess that agility of purpose which, at a moment's
notice, could enable her to twist her intentions--a mental
somersault that needs the double-jointedness of cunning and all the
consummate flexibility of tact. He might know that she had followed
them, but she must never admit it. It seemed a feasible argument to
her, in the whirling panic of her thoughts, that her admission would
be fatal--just as the prisoner in the dock pleads "not guilty"
against all the damning evidence of every witness who can be brought
against him.

"I've been in about half an hour," she replied.

"Did you dine with Devenish?"

The same direct form of question, thrown at her with the same
implacable scrutiny of his eyes.

"Yes," she replied.

"Where?"

She mentioned the name of the restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue.

"W