ng dark eyes, in his red lips, in his healthy and manly
face with its rosy brown complexion and its powerful decided chin.
He had none of the sleepiness and fatalistic languor of the fat
hubble-bubble smoking Turk of caricature. The whole of him looked
aristocratic, energetic, perfectly poised and absolutely self-possessed.
Many of the women in court glanced at him without any distaste.

Aristide Dumeny was almost strangely different--an ashy-pale, dark-eyed,
thin and romantic-visaged man, stamped with a curious expression of pain
and fatalism. He looked as if he had seen much, dreamed many dreams,
and suffered not a little. There was in his face something slightly
contemptuous, as if, intellectually, he seldom gazed up at any man. He
watched Mrs. Clarke in the box with an enigmatic closeness of attention
which seemed wholly impersonal, even when she was replying to hideous
questions about himself. That he had an interesting personality was
certain. When his eyes rested on the twelve jurymen he smiled every so
faintly. It seemed to him, perhaps, absurd that they should have power
over the future of the woman in the witness-box.

That woman showed an extraordinary self-possession which touched dignity
but which never descended to insolence. Despite her obvious cleverness
and mental resource she preserved a certain simplicity. She did not pose
as a passionate innocent, or assume any forced airs of supreme virtue.
She presented herself rather as a woman of the world who was careless of
the conventions, because she thought of them as chains which prevented
free movement and were destructive of genuine liberty. She acknowledged
that she had been a great deal with Hadi Bey and Dumeny, that she had
often made long excursions with each of them on foot, on horseback, in
caiques, that she had had them to dinner, separately, on many occasions
in a little pavilion which stood at the end of her husband's garden and
looked upon the Bosporus. These dinners had frequently taken place when
her husband was away from home. Monsieur Dumeny was a good musician and
had sometimes sung and played to her till late in the night. Hadi Bey
had sometimes been her guide in Constantinople and had given to her the
freedom of his strange and mysterious city of Stamboul. With him she had
visited the mosques, with him she had explored the bazaars, with him
she had sunk down in the strange and enveloping melancholy of the vast
Turkish cemeteries which are