For some minutes I felt like a fool, but I stammered out at length that I had come for his direction and to learn what relief the Church could give me.

“H’m!” said the Bishop, and then crossing one leg over the other, and fumbling the silver buckle of his shoe, he said: 

“The Church, dear lady, does indeed provide alleviation in cases of dire necessity.  It provides the relief of separation—­always deploring the necessity and hoping for ultimate reconciliation.  But to sanction the separation of a wife from her husband because—­pardon me, I do not say this is your case—­she finds that he does not please her, or because—­again I do not say this is your case—­she fancies that somebody else pleases her better. . . .”

“Monsignor,” I said, feeling hot and dizzy, “we need not discuss separation.  I am thinking of something much more serious.”

Never shall I forget the expression of the Bishop’s face.  He looked aghast.

“My good lady, surely you are not thinking of divorce?”

I think my head must have dropped as in silent assent, for in a peremptory and condemnatory manner the Bishop took me to task, asking if I did not know that the Catholic Church did not recognise divorce under any circumstances, and if I had forgotten what the Holy Father himself (pointing up to the portrait) had said to me—­that when I entered into the solemn contract of holy matrimony I was to do so in the full consciousness that it could not be broken but by death.

“The love in which husband and wife contract to hold each other in holy wedlock is typified by the love of Christ for His Church, and as the one can never be broken, neither can the other.”

“But my husband does not love me,” I said.  “Neither do I love him, and therefore the contract between us is broken already.”

The Bishop was very severe with me for this, telling me that as a good child of the Church, I must never, never say that again, for though marriage was a contract it differed from all other contracts whatsoever.

“When you married your husband, dear lady, you were bound to him not by your own act alone, but by a mysterious power from which neither of you can ever free yourself.  The power that united you was God, and whom God has joined together no man may put asunder.”

I felt my head drooping.  The Bishop was saying what I had always been taught, though in the torment of my trouble and the fierce fire of my temptation I had forgotten it.

“The civil law might divorce you,” continued the Bishop.  “I don’t know—­I can say nothing about that.  But it would have no right to do so because the law can have no right to undo what God Himself has done.”

Oh, it was cruel!  I felt as if the future of my life were darkening before me—­as if the iron bars of a prison were closing upon me, and fetters were being fixed on every limb.