"Sarajevo—where's Sarajevo? Ask him about the Verdict—I simply must know!"
The Verdict had been "Not Guilty," according to the waiter.... The Goblin screamed:
"But she is!—she is! Good heavens, my dear Sir Thomas! Isn't it murder to riddle an editor to death in his own office, before his subordinates, with bullets from a revolver you've hidden in your muff?"
Brayham summoned up his best King's Bench manner to answer:
"If he dies—and a jury don't happen to decide that you're innocent—the evidence is against you, my dear ma'am!"
Lady Wathe's vivacious gestures provoked astounding coruscations from her panoply of jewels. She had been certain from the first that there would be no capital sentence. But "Not Guilty." ... Surely it should have been Mazas for life. Or New Caledonia—didn't they send murderesses to New Caledonia?
Brayham, with a tone and manner even more deeply tinged with the King's Bench, begged leave to correct—arah!—his very dear friend's impression that the blameless and much-tried lady, now probably—aha—arah!—supping in the company of her husband and her advocate in her own luxurious dining-room, might, without libel, be called a murderess. Like—aha!—many other highly-strung women, Madame Perdroux had had recourse to the revolver as the ultima ratio. But the Verdict pronounced by the President of the Paris Court of Assize that afternoon had—arah!—purged——
"Bother the Verdict!" snapped the Goblin.
Brayham, incensed at this irreverence, replied with acrimony. The pair wrangled as Paris had wrangled since March 16th, while the great, crowded restaurant buzzed with the name of an obscure town in Eastern Europe—"Sarajevo, Sarajevo"—tossed and bandied from mouth to mouth.
We have learned to our bitter cost the appalling significance of this crime of Sarajevo, which had dwarfed in the estimation of the keen-witted Parisians the most sensational cause célèbre ever tried before a French Criminal Court.