what I tell you. Have faith and confidence in me and you may remedy the past
and go to Australia. Think of the talk this may give rise to. Keep up
appearances for your own sake. . . . ."
He then took her up-stairs to a bedroom and made her drink some wine and lie
down for some time. She afterwards left the house; she hardly knew how; he
accompanied her to the door, she thought; but could not be certain; she was
half dazed.
The judge here interposed with the crucial question:
"Did you know that you had been violated?"
The audience waited breathlessly; after a short pause Miss Travers replied:
"Yes."
Then it was true, the worst was true. The audience, excited to the highest
pitch, caught breath with malevolent delight. But the thrills were not
exhausted. Miss Travers next told how in Dr. Wilde's study one evening she had
been vexed at some slight, and at once took four pennyworth of laudanum which
she had bought. Dr. Wilde hurried her round to the house of Dr. Walsh, a
physician in the neighbourhood, who gave her an antidote. Dr. Wilde was
dreadfully frightened lest something should get out. . . .
She admitted at once that she had sometimes asked Dr. Wilde for money: she
thought nothing of it as she had again and again repaid him the monies which
he had lent her.
Miss Travers' examination in chief had been intensely interesting. The
fashionable ladies had heard all they had hoped to hear, and it was noticed that
they were not so eager to get seats in the court from this time on, though the
room was still crowded.
The cross-examination of Miss Travers was at least as interesting to the student
of human nature as the examination in chief had been, for in her story of what
took place on that 14th of October, weaknesses and discrepancies of memory were
discovered and at length improbabilities and contradictions in the narrative
itself.
First of all it was elicited that she could not be certain of the day; it might
have been the 15th or the 16th: it was Friday the 14th, she thought. . . . It
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