“That’s it, my child!  That’s it!  I know!  I know!”

Then he began to blame himself for everything, saying it was all his fault and that he should have held out longer.  When he saw how things stood between me and my husband he should have said to my father, to the Bishop, and to the lawyers, notwithstanding all their bargainings:  “This marriage must not go on.  It will lead to disaster.  It begins to end badly.”

“But now it is all over, my child, and there’s no help for it.”

I think the real strength of my resistance to Aunt Bridget’s coarse ridicule and the advocate’s callous remonstrance must have been the memory of my husband’s threat when he talked about the possible annulment of our marriage.  The thought of that came back to me now, and half afraid, half ashamed, with a fluttering of the heart, I tried to mention it.

“Is there no way out?” I asked.

“What way can there be?” said Father Dan.  “God knows I know what pressure was put upon you; but you are married, you have made your vows, you have given your promises.  That’s all the world sees or cares about, and in the eyes of the law and the Church you are responsible for all that has happened.”

With my head still buried in Father Dan’s cassock I got it out at last.

“But annulment!  Isn’t that possible—­under the circumstances?” I asked.

The good old priest seemed to be too confused to speak for a moment.  Then he explained that what I hoped for was quite out of the question.

“I don’t say that in the history of the Church marriages have not been annulled on equally uncertain grounds, but in this case the civil law would require proof—­something to justify nullity.  Failing that there would have to be collusion either on one side or both, and that is not possible—­not to you, my child, not to the daughter of your mother, that dear saint who suffered so long and was silent.”

More than ever now I felt like a ship-broken man with the last plank sinking under him.  The cold mysterious dread of my husband was creeping back, and the future of my life with him stood before me with startling vividness.  In spite of all my struggling and fighting of the night before I saw myself that very night, the next night, and the next, and every night and day of my life thereafter, a victim of the same sickening terror.

“Must I submit, then?” I said.

Father Dan smoothed my head and told me in his soft voice that submission was the lot of all women.  It always had been so in the history of the world, and perhaps it always would be.

“Remember the Epistle we read in church yesterday morning:  ’Wives submit yourselves to your husbands.’”

With a choking sensation in my throat I asked if he thought I ought to go away with my husband when he left the island by the afternoon steamer.

“I see no escape from it, my poor child.  They sent me to reprove you.  I can’t do that, but neither can I encourage you to resist.  It would be wrong.  It would be cruel.  It would only lead you into further trouble.”