“Yes, he’s ill, but he has only to set Curphy to work and the lawyer will do the rest.”

I could not allow him to go any further, so I blurted out somehow that I had seen my father already.

“On this subject?”

“Yes.”

“And what did he say?”

I told him as well as I could what my father had said, being ashamed to repeat it.

“That was only bluff, though,” said Martin.  “The real truth is that you would cease to be Lady Raa and that would be a blow to his pride.  Then there would no longer be any possibility of establishing a family and that would disturb his plans.  No matter!  We can set Curphy to work ourselves.”

“But I have seen Mr. Curphy also,” I said.

“And what did he say?”

I told him what the lawyer had said and he was aghast.

“Good heavens!  What an iniquity!  In England too!  But never mind!  There are other countries where this relic of the barbaric ages doesn’t exist.  We’ll go there.  We must get you a divorce somehow.”

My time had come.  I could keep back the truth no longer.

“But Martin,” I said, “divorce is impossible for me—­quite impossible.”

And then I told him that I had been to see the Bishop also, and he had said what I had known before, though in the pain of my temptation I had forgotten it, that the Catholic Church did not countenance divorce under any circumstances, because God made marriages and therefore no man could dissolve them.

Martin listened intently, and in his eagerness to catch every word he raised himself to a kneeling position by my side, so that he was looking into my face.

“But Mary, my dear Mary,” he said, “you don’t mean to say you will allow such considerations to influence you?”

“I am a Catholic—­what else can I do?” I said.

“But think—­my dear, dear girl, think how unreasonable, how untrue, how preposterous it all is in a case like yours?  God made your marriage?  Yours?  God married you to that notorious profligate?  Can you believe it?”

His eyes were flaming.  I dared not look at them.

“Then think again.  They say there’s no divorce in the Catholic Church, do they?  But what are they talking about?  Morally speaking you are a divorced woman already.  Anybody with an ounce of brains can see that.  When you were married to this man he made a contract with you, and he has broken the terms of it, hasn’t he?  Then where’s the contract now?  It doesn’t any longer exist.  Your husband has destroyed it.”

“But isn’t marriage different?” I asked.

And then I tried to tell him what the Bishop had said of the contract of marriage being unlike any other contract because God Himself had become a party to it.

“What?” he cried.  “God become a party to a marriage like yours?  My dear girl, only think!  Think of what your marriage has been—­the pride and vanity and self-seeking that conceived it, the compulsion that was put upon you to carry it through, and then the shame and the suffering and the wickedness and the sin of it!  Was God a party to the making of a marriage like that?”