“Martin!  Martin!  Forgive me, forgive me,” I cried.

I felt so hot that I opened my dressing-gown to cool my bare breast.  After a while I began to shiver and then fearing I might take cold I went back to the boudoir, and sat down.

I looked at my cuckoo clock.  It was half-past twelve.  Only half an hour since Martin had left me!  It seemed like hours and hours.  What of the years and years of my life that I had still to spend without him?

The room was so terribly silent, yet it seemed to be full of our dead laughter.  The ghost of our happiness seemed to haunt it.  I was sure I could never live in it again.

I wondered what Martin would be doing now.  Would he be in bed and asleep, or sitting up like this, and thinking of me as I was thinking of him?

At one moment I thought I heard his footsteps.  I listened, but the sound stopped.  At another moment, covering my face with my hands, I thought I saw him in his room, as plainly as if there were no walls dividing us.  He was holding out his hands to me, and his face had the yearning, loving, despairing expression which it had worn when he looked back at me from the door.

At yet another moment I thought I heard him calling me.

“Mary!”

I listened again, but again all was still, and when I told myself that if in actual fact he had spoken my name it was perhaps only to himself (as I was speaking his) my heart throbbed up to my throat.

Once more I heard his voice.

“Mary!”

I could bear no more.  Martin wanted me.  I must go to him.  Though body and soul were torn asunder I must go.

Before I knew what I was doing I had opened the door and was walking across the corridor in the direction of Martin’s room.

The house was dark.  Everybody had gone to bed.  Light as my footsteps were, the landing was creaking under me.  I knew that the floors of the grim old Castle sometimes made noises when nobody walked on them, but none the less I felt afraid.

Half way to Martin’s door I stopped.  A ghostly hand seemed to be laid on my shoulder and a ghostly voice seemed to say in my ear: 

“Wait!  Reflect!  If you do what you are thinking of doing what will happen?  You will become an outcast.  The whole body of your own sex will turn against you.  You will be a bad woman.”

I knew what it was.  It was my conscience speaking to me in the voice of my Church—­my Church, the mighty, irresistible power that was separating me from Martin.  I was its child, born in its bosom, but if I broke its laws it would roll over me like a relentless Juggernaut.

It was not at first that I could understand why the Church should set itself up against my Womanhood.  My Womanhood was crying out for life and love and liberty.  But the Church, in its inexorable, relentless voice, was saying, “Thou Shalt Not!”

After a moment of impenetrable darkness, within and without, I thought I saw things more plainly.  The Church was the soul of the world.  It stood for purity, which alone could hold the human family together.  If all women who had made unhappy marriages were to do as I was thinking of doing (no matter under what temptation) the world would fall to wreck and ruin.