"How good you are! .... And shall we be able to leave the Isle of Man and go away somewhere?"
"Perhaps .... some day."
"Oh, how good you are! I don't know what I've done for you to be so good to me. I didn't think anybody except a girl's mother could be so good to her."
She was like a child again. Her face, though still wet, was beaming. In the selfishness of her suffering it had not occurred to her before that her comforter had been suffering also, but now, in some vague way, she became aware of it.
"If they ask me who he was," she said, in a whisper (meaning who had been her fellow-sinner), "I'll never tell them—never!"
Fenella's humiliation was abject. "When we go back to Court," she said, "you must be brave, whatever happens."
"Will you let me hold your hand?" said Bessie.
And Fenella, scarcely able to speak, answered,
"Yes."
In the Deemster's room there was a painful silence. The Clerk of the Rolls was under the deeply-recessed window, turning over the crinkling folios of the Depositions in the case to be taken next. The Governor, stretched out in the leathern bound armchair before the empty fireplace, was smoking hard and trying to justify himself to his own conscience. Stowell was sitting at the end of the long table, with his head in his hands, gazing down at the red blotting-pad in front of him.