The truth was that England, so proud of her systems, had had a fright.

Her judicial methods had very nearly failed to make a man take his collar off in public.

They had really failed, but it had all come right in the end, and so England pretended that they had only just missed failing.

A grave injustice would have been perpetrated had Priam chosen not to take off his collar.

People said, naturally, that imprisonment for bigamy would have included the taking-off of collars; but then it was rumoured that prosecution for bigamy had not by any means been a certainty, as since leaving the box Mrs.Henry Leek had wavered in her identification.