Yet who could explain? Circumstances
of time and place rendered all protest impossible. Nothing could be done,
nothing said. Thus her beloved persons were exposed, judged, condemned
unheard, without opportunity of defence.
And realizing this, realizing redress hopelessly barred, she cowered
down, her head bowed, almost to the level of the marble couch whereon the
figures of knight and lady reposed in the high serenity of love and
death. Happier they than she, poor child, for her pride trailed in the
dust, her darling romance of brother and sister and all the rare pieties
of her heart, defiled by a shameful publicity, exposed for every Tom,
Dick and Harry to paw over and sneer at!
Horror of a crowd, which watches the infliction of some signal disgrace,
tormented her imagination, moreover, to the temporary breaking of her
spirit. Whether that crowd was, in the main, hostile or sympathetic
mattered nothing. The fact that it silently sat there, silently observed,
made every member of it, for the time, her enemy.
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