While I was speaking I knew that Martin’s eyes were fixed on me, for I could feel his breath on the back of my hands, but before I had finished he leapt up and cried excitedly: 

“And that compact has been kept?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s all right!  Don’t be afraid.  You shall be free.  Come in and let me tell you how!  Come in, come in!”

He took me back into the boudoir.  I had no power to resist him.  His face was as pale as death, but his eyes were shining.  He made me sit down and then sat on the table in front of me.

“Listen!” he said.  “When I bought my ship from the Lieutenant we signed a deed, a contract, as a witness before all men that he would give me his ship and I would give him some money.  But if after all he hadn’t given me his ship what would our deed have been?  Only so much waste paper.”

It was the same with my marriage.  If it had been an honest contract, the marriage service would have been a witness before God that we meant to live together as man and wife.  But I never had, therefore what was the marriage service?  Only an empty ceremony!

“That’s the plain sense of the matter, isn’t it?” he cried.  “I defy any priest in the world to prove the contrary.”

“Well?”

“Well, don’t you see what it comes to?  You are free—­morally free at all events.  You can come to me.  You must, too.  I daren’t leave you in this house any longer.  I shall take you to London and fix you up there, and then, when I tome back from the Antarctic . . .”

He was glowing with joy, but a cold hand suddenly seized me, for I had remembered all the terrors of excommunication as Father Dan had described them.

“But Martin,” I said, “would the Church accept that?”

“What matter whether it would or wouldn’t?  Our consciences would be clear.  There would be no sin, and what you were saying this morning would not apply.”

“But if I left my husband I couldn’t marry you, could I?”

“Perhaps not.”

“Then the Church would say that I was a sinful woman living a sinful life, wouldn’t it?”

“But you wouldn’t be.”

“All the same the Church would say so, and if it did I should be cut out of communion, and if I were cut out of communion I should be cast out of the Church, and if I were cast out of the Church . . . what would become of me then?”

“But, my dear, dear girl,” said Martin, “don’t you see that this is not the same thing at all?  It is only a case of a ceremony.  And why should a mere ceremony—­even if we cannot do away with it—­darken a woman’s life for ever?”

My heart was yearning for love, but my soul was crying out for salvation; and not being able to answer him for myself, I told him what Father Dan had said I was to say.

“Father Dan is a saint and I love him,” he said.  “But what can he know—­what can any priest know of a situation like this?  The law of man has tied you to this brute, but the law of God has given you to me.  Why should a marriage service stand between us?”