But still Geoffrey might have
escaped destruction. Public opinion, or the sounder part of it, is
sensibly enough hard to move in such a matter, especially when the
person said to have been wronged is heart and soul on the side of him
who is said to have wronged her.
Moreover there might have been ways out of it, of which she knew
nothing. But surrounded as she was by threatening powers--by Lady
Honoria threatening actions in the Courts on one side, by Owen Davies
threatening exposure on another, by Elizabeth ready and willing to
give the most damning evidence on the third, to Beatrice the worst
consequences seemed an absolutely necessary sequence. Then there was her
own conscience arrayed against her. This particular charge was a lie,
but it was not a lie that she loved Geoffrey, and to her the two things
seemed very much the same thing. Hers was not a mind to draw fine
distinctions in such matters. _Se posuit ut culpabilem_: she "placed
herself as guilty," as the old Court rolls put it in miserable Latin,
and this sense of guilt disarmed her. She did not realise the enormous
difference recognised by the whole civilised world between thought and
act, between disposing mind and inculpating deed.
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