If I had held a revolver in Aunt Bridget’s face she could not have looked more shocked.

“Mary O’Neill, are you mad?” she cried.  “Divorce indeed!  No woman of our family has ever disgraced herself like that.  What will your father say?  What’s to happen to Betsy Beauty?  What are people going to think about me?”

I answered that I had not made my marriage, and those who had made it must take the consequences.

“What does that matter now?  Hundreds of thousands of women have married the wrong man of their own free will, but if every woman who has made a rue-bargain were to try to get out of it your way where would the world be, I wonder?  Perhaps you think you could marry somebody else, but you couldn’t.  What decent man wants to marry a divorced woman even if she is the injured party?”

“Then you think I ought to submit—­tamely submit to such infidelities?” I asked.

“Sakes alive,” said Aunt Bridget, “what else can you do?  Men are polygamous animals, and we women have to make up our minds to it.  Goodness knows I had to when the old colonel used to go hanging around those English barmaids at the ‘Cock and Hen.’  Be a little blind, girl—­that’s what nine wives out of ten have to be every day and every night and all the world over.”

“Will that make my husband any better?” I asked.

“I don’t say it will,” said Aunt Bridget.  “It will make you better, though.  What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve for.  That’s something, isn’t it?”

When I went to bed that night my whole soul was in revolt.  The Church, the law, society, parental power, all the conventions and respectabilities seemed to be in a conspiracy to condone my husband’s offence and to make me his scapegoat, doomed to a life of hypocrisy and therefore immorality and shame.  I would die rather than endure it.  Yes, I would die that very day rather than return to my husband’s house and go through the same ordeal again.

But next morning when I thought of Martin, as I always did on first awakening, I told myself that I would live and be a clean woman in my own eyes whatever the World might think of me.

Martin was now my only refuge, so I would tell him everything.  It would be hard to do that, but no matter, I would crush down my modesty and tell him everything.  And then, whatever he told me to do I should do it.

I knew quite well what my resolution meant, what it implied and involved, but still I thought, “Whatever he tells me to do I will do it.”

I remembered what the Countess in Rome had said about a life of “complete emancipation” as an escape from unhappy marriage, and even yet I thought “Whatever he tells me to do I will do it.”

After coming to that conclusion I felt more at ease and got up to dress.

It was a beautiful morning, and I looked down into the orchard, where the apples were reddening under the sunshine and the gooseberries were ripening under their hanging boughs, when in the quiet summer air I heard a footstep approaching.