“Rescind our contract,” she insisted, pleading, with the overpowering vehemence of a love absolutely unselfish, against love’s deepest instincts and that egotism which is almost inseparable from it; giving passionate utterance to an affection such as men rarely feel for women, women perhaps never for men.  “Divorce me; force the enemy to believe that you have broken with my father and with his Order; and, favoured as you are by the Sovereign, you will be safe.  Give what reason you will; say that I have deserved it, that I have forced you to it.  I know that contracts are revoked with the full approval of the Courts and of the public, though I hardly know why.  I will agree; and if we are agreed, you can give or withhold reasons as you please.  Nay, there can be no wrong to me in doing what I entreat you to do.  I shall not suffer long—­no, no, I will live, I will be happy”—­her face white to the lips, her streaming tears were not needed to belie the words!  “By your love for me, do not let me feel that you are to die—­do not keep me in dread to hear that you have died—­for me and through me.”

If it had been in her power to leave me, if one-half of the promised period had not been yet to run, she might have enforced her purpose in despite of all that I could urge;—­of reason, of entreaty, of the pleadings of a love in this at least as earnest as her own.  Nay, she would probably have left me, in the hope of exhibiting to the world the appearance of an open quarrel, but for a peculiarity of Martial law.  That law enforces, on the plea of either party, “specific performance” of the marriage contract.  I could reclaim her, and call the force of the State to recover her.  When even this warning at first failed to enforce her submission, I swore by all I held sacred in my own world and all she revered in hers—­by the symbols never lightly invoked, and never, in the course of ages that cover thrice the span of Terrestrial history and tradition, invoked to sanction a lie; symbols more sacred in her eyes than, in those of mediaeval Christendom, the gathered relics that appalled the heroic soul of Harold Godwinsson—­that she should only defeat her own purpose; that I would reclaim my wife before the Order and before the law, thus asserting more clearly than ever the strength of the tie that bound me to her and to her house.  The oath which it was impossible to break, perhaps yet more the cold and measured tone with which I spoke, in striving to control the white heat of a passion as much stronger as it was more selfish than hers—­a tone which sounded to myself unnatural and alien—­at last compelled her to yield; and silenced her in the only moment in which the depths of that nature, so sweet and soft and gentle, were stirred by the violence of a moral tempest....  A marvellously perfect example of Martial art and science is furnished by the Observatory of the Astronomic Academy, on a mountain about twenty miles from the Residence.  The hill