his logic. It beat her, and she had to acknowledge it.
"If you wish to be excused, Sir Oliver, then I excuse you. You need not consider your honor stained. I seem to have asked of you more than is just."
He felt an overwhelming relief, and was ashamed of it.
"What will you do?" he asked gently, the tension and the sense of doom skipping away from him, but in their place was a whisper of failure, as if some opportunity had been lost, and even a sort of loneliness.
"If you see the situation as you have said, no doubt any other barrister of like skill and honor will see it the same way," she answered. "They will advise me as you have. And then I shall have to reply to them as I have to you, so I shall have gained nothing. There is only one person who believes in the necessity of pursuing the case."
"Who is that?" He was surprised. He could imagine no one.
"I, of course."
"You cannot represent yourself!" he protested.
"There is no alternative that I am prepared to accept." She stared at him with a very slight smile, irony and amusement mixed in it - and behind it, fear.
"Then I shall continue to represent you, unless you prefer me not to." He was horrified as he heard his own voice. It was rash to a degree. But he could hardly abandon her to her fate, even if she had brought it upon herself.
She smiled ruefully, full of gratitude.
"Thank you, Sir Oliver."
"That was most unwise," Henry Rathbone said gravely. He was leaning against the mantelshelf in his sitting room. The French doors were no longer open onto the garden, and there was a brisk fire burning in the hearth. He looked unhappy. Oliver had just told him of his decision to defend Zorah in spite of the fact that she refused absolutely to withdraw her accusation or to make any sort of accommodation to sense, or even to her own social survival, possibly to her financial survival also.
Oliver did not want to repeat the details of the discussion. It sounded, in retrospect, as if he had been precipitate, governed far more by emotion than intelligence, a fault he deplored in others.
"I don't see any honorable alternative," he said stubbornly. "I cannot simply leave her. She has put herself in a completely vulnerable position."
"And you with her," Henry added. He sighed and moved away from the front of the fire, where he was beginning to be uncomfortable. He sat down and fished his pipe out of his jacket pocket He knocked the pipe against the fireplace, cleaned out the bowl, then filled it with tobacco again. He put it in his mouth and lit it. It went out almost immediately, but he did not seem to care.
"We must see what can be salvaged out of the situation." He looked steadily at Oliver. "I don't think you appreciate how deeply people's feelings run in this sort of issue."
"Slander?" Oliver asked with surprise. "I doubt it. And if murder is proved, then she will to some extent be justified." He was comfortable in his usual chair at the other side of the fire. He slid down a little farther in it. "I think that is the thrust I must take, prove that there is sufficient evidence to believe that a crime has been committed. Possibly in the emotion, the shock and outrage of learning that Friedrich was murdered, albeit for political reasons, they will overlook Zorah's charge against Gisela." His spirits lifted a little as he said it. It was the beginning of a sensible approach instead of the blank wall he had faced even a few minutes ago.
"No, I did not mean slander," Henry replied, taking his pipe out of his mouth but not bothering to relight it. He held it by the bowl, pointing with it as he spoke. "I meant the challenging of people's preconceptions of certain events and characters, their beliefs, which have become part of how they see the world and their own value in it. If you force people to change their minds too quickly, they cannot readjust everything, and they will blame you for their discomfort, the sense of confusion and loss of balance."
"I think you are overstating the case," Oliver said firmly. "There are very few people so unsophisticated as to imagine women never kill their husbands, or that minor European royal families are so very different from the rest of us very fallible