I could hear him on the lawn with Tommy the Mate, laughing like a boy let loose from school, and when I went down to him he greeted me with a cry of joy that was almost heart-breaking.

Our way to the glen was through a field of grass, where the dew was thick, and, my boots being thin, Martin in his high spirits wished to carry me across, and it was only with an effort that I prevented him from doing so.

The glen itself when we reached it (it was called Glen Raa) was almost cruelly beautiful that day, and remembering what I had to do in it I thought I should never be able to get it out of my sight—­with its slumberous gloom like that of a vast cathedral, its thick arch of overhanging boughs through which the morning sunlight was streaming slantwards like the light through the windows of a clerestory, its running water below, its rustling leaves above, and the chirping of its birds on every side, making a sound that was like the chanting of a choir in some far-off apse and the rumbling of their voices in the roof.

Two or three times, as we walked down the glen towards a port (Port Raa) which lay at the seaward end of it.  Martin rallied me on the settled gravity of my face and then I had to smile, though how I did so I do not know, for every other minute my heart was in my mouth, and never more so than when, to make me laugh, he rattled away in the language of his boyhood, saying: 

“Isn’t this stunning?  Splendiferous, eh?”

When we came out at the mouth of the port, where a line of little stunted oaks leaned landward as with the memory of many a winter’s storm, Martin said: 

“Let us sit down here.”

We sat on the sloping bank, with the insects ticking in the grass, the bees humming in the air, the sea fowl screaming in the sky, the broad sea in front, and the little bay below, where the tide, which was going out, had left behind it a sharp reef of black rocks covered with sea-weed.

A pleasure-steamer passed at that moment with its flags flying, its awnings spread, its decks crowded with excursionists, and a brass hand playing one of Sousa’s marches, and as soon as it had gone, Martin said: 

“I’ve been thinking about our affair, Mary, how to go to work and all that, and of course the first thing we’ve got to do is to get a divorce.”

I made no answer, and I tried not to look at him by fixing my eyes upon the sea.

“You have evidence enough, you know, and if you haven’t there’s Price—­she has plenty.  So, since you’ve given me the right to speak for you, dear, I’m going to speak to your father first”

I must have made some half-articulate response, for not understanding me he said: 

“Oh, I know he’ll be a hard nut to crack.  He won’t want to hear what I’ve got to say, but he has got to hear it.  And after all you’re his daughter, and if he has any bowels of compassion . . .”

Again I must have made some effort to speak, for he said: