After this little spar, the two artists in law bade each other farewell with every demonstration of civility.
Sir Charles would not apologize.
The plaintiff filed his declaration.
The defendant pleaded not guilty, but did not disclose a defense. The law allows a defendant in libel this advantage.
Plaintiff joined issue, and the trial was set down for the next assizes.
Sir Charles was irritated, but nothing more. Lady Bassett, with a woman's natural shrinking from publicity, felt it more deeply. She would have given thousands of her own money to keep the matter out of court. But her very terror of Richard Bassett restrained her. She was always thinking about him, and had convinced herself he was the ablest villain in the wide world; and she thought to herself, “If, with his small means, he annoys Charles so, what would he do if I were to enrich him? He would crush us.”
As the trial drew near she began to hover about Sir Charles in his study, like an anxious hen. The maternal yearnings were awakened in her by marriage, and she had no child; so her Charles in trouble was husband and child.
Sometimes she would come in and just kiss his forehead, and run out again, casting back a celestial look of love at the door, and, though it was her husband she had kissed, she blushed divinely. At last one day she crept in and said, very timidly, “Charles dear, the anonymous letter—is not that an excuse for libeling him—as they call telling the truth?”
“Why, of course it is. Have you got it?”
“Dearest, the brave lady took it away.”