"This is your opinion, Mr. Campbell? And you believe that Mrs. Gardiner, now a very respectable widow in her thirties, was so terrified that you would express this unfortunate view of her childhood and ruin the prospective happiness of your nephew?"

"Hardly unreasonable," Tobias interrupted. "What man would not tell his sister whom he loved that her only son was engaged to marry a maid no better than a whore?"

"But he didn’t!" Rathbone exclaimed. "He told no one! In fact, you first heard him apologize to his brother-in-law this moment for saying it now." He swung around. "Why was that, Mr. Campbell? If she was such a woman as you describe—should I say, such a child—why did you not warn your family rather than allow her to marry into it? If what you say is true..."

"It is true," Campbell said gravely. "The state she was in that Mrs. Anderson described fits, regrettably, with what I know of her." His hands gripped the rail of the witness box in front of him. He seemed to hold it as if to steady himself from shaking. He had difficulty finding his voice. "She seduced one of my servants, a previously decent man, who fell into temptation too strong for him to resist. I considered dismissing him, but his work was excellent, and he was bitterly ashamed of his lapse from virtue. It would have ruined him at the start of his life." He stopped for a moment.

Rathbone waited.

"I did not know at the time," Campbell went on with obvious difficulty. "But she was with child. She had it aborted."

There was an outcry in the courtroom. A woman shrieked. There was a commotion as someone apparently collapsed.

The judge banged his gavel, but it made little impression.

Miriam made as if to rise to her feet, but the jailers on either side of her pulled her back.

Rathbone looked at the jury. To a man their faces were marked deeply with shock and utter and savage contempt.

The judge banged his gavel again. "I will have order!" he said angrily. "Otherwise the ushers will clear the court!"

Tobias looked across at Rathbone and shook his head.

When the noise subsided, and before Rathbone could speak, Campbell continued. "That must be the reason that she was bleeding when Mrs. Anderson found her wandering around on the Heath." He shook his head as if to deny what he was about to say, somehow reduce the harshness of it. "At first I didn’t want to put her out either. She was so young. I thought—one mistake—and it had been a rough abortion— she was still..." He shrugged. Then he raised his head and looked at Rathbone. "But she kept on, always tempting the men, flirting with them, setting one against the other. She enjoyed the power she had over them. I had no choice but to put her out."

There was a murmur of sympathy around the court, and a rising tide of anger also. One or two men swore under their breath. Two jurors spoke to each other. They glanced up at the dock. The condemnation in their faces was unmistakable.