I was always conscious, too, that Martin’s mother and father, not to speak of Father Dan, were suffering from a similar feeling, for sometimes when we talked about the future their looks would answer to my thoughts, and it was just as if we were all silently waiting, waiting, waiting for some event that was to justify and rehabilitate me.

It came at last—­for me with a startling suddenness.

One morning, nurse being out on an errand and Christian Ann patting her butter in the dairy, I was playing with baby on the rag-work hearthrug when our village newsman came to the threshold of the open door.

“Take a Times,” he said.  “You might as well be out of the world, ma’am, as not know what’s going on in it.”

I took one of his island newspapers, and after he had gone I casually glanced at it.

But what a shock it gave me!  The first heading that flew in my face was—­

     “INSULAR DIVORCE BILL PASSED.”

It was a report of the proceedings of the Supreme Court of our Ellan legislature, which (notwithstanding the opposition of its ecclesiastical members) had granted my husband’s petition.

Perhaps I ought to have had a sense of immense relief.  Or perhaps I should have gone down on my knees there and then, and thanked God that the miserable entanglement of the horrible marriage that had been forced upon me was at last at an end.

But no, I had only one feeling as the newspaper fell from my fingers—­shame and humiliation, not for myself (for what did it matter about me, anyway?), but for Martin, whose name, now so famous, I had, through my husband’s malice, been the means of dragging through the dust.

I remember that I thought I should never be able to look into my darling’s face again, that when he came in the afternoon (as he always did) I should have to run away from him, and that all that was left to me was to hide myself and die.

But just as these wild thoughts were galloping through my brain I heard the sneck of the garden gate, and almost before I was aware of what else was happening Martin had come sweeping into the house like a rush of wind, thrown his arms around me, and covered my face, my neck, and my hands with kisses—­never having done so before since I came to live at his mother’s home.

“Such news!  Such news!” he cried.  “We are free, free, free!”

Then, seeing the newspaper at my feet on the floor, he said: 

“Ah, I see you know already.  I told them to keep everything away from you—­all the miserable legal business.  But no matter!  It’s over now.  Of course it’s shocking—­perfectly shocking—­that that squirming worm, after his gross infidelities, should have been able to do what he has done.  But what matter about that either?  He has done just what we wanted—­what you couldn’t do for yourself before I went away, your conscience forbidding you.  The barrier that has divided us is down . . . now we can be married at any time.”