He walked two or three paces in front of the garden-house and then came back to me with flaming eyes.

“But that’s not your case, anyway,” he said.  “Father Dan knows perfectly that your marriage was no marriage at all—­only a sordid bit of commercial bargaining, in which your husband gave you his bad name for your father’s unclean money.  It was no marriage in any other sense either, and might have been annulled if there had been any common honesty in annulment.  And now that it has tumbled to wreck and ruin, as anybody might have seen it would do, you are told that you are bound to it to the last day and hour of your life!  After all you have gone through—­all you have suffered—­never to know another hour of happiness as long as you live!  While your husband, notwithstanding his brutalities and infidelities, is free to do what he likes, to marry whom he pleases!  How stupid!  How disgusting! how damnable!”

His passionate voice was breaking, he could scarcely control it.

“Oh, I know what they’ll say.  It will be the old, old song, ’Whom God hath joined together.’  That’s what this old Church of ours has been saying for centuries to poor women with broken hearts.  Has the Church itself got a heart to break?  No—­nothing but its cast-iron laws which have been broken a thousand times and nobody a penny the worse.”

“But I wonder,” he continued, “I wonder why these churchmen, who would talk about the impossibility of putting asunder those whom God has joined together, don’t begin by asking themselves how and when and where God joins them.  Is it in church, when they stand before the altar and are asked a few questions, and give a few answers?  If so, then God is responsible for some of the most shocking transactions that ever disgraced humanity—­all the pride and vanity and deliberate concubinage that have covered themselves in every age, and are covering themselves still, with the cloak of marriage.”

“But no,” said Martin, “it’s not in churches that God marries people.  They’ve got to be married before they go there, or they are never married at all—­never!  They’ve got to be married in their hearts, for that’s where God joins people together, not in churches and before priests and altars.”

I sat listening to him with a rising and throbbing heart, and after another moment he stepped into the garden-house, and sat beside me.

“Mary,” he said, in his passionate voice, “that’s our case, isn’t it?  God married us from the very first.  There has never been any other woman for me, and there never has been any other man for you—­isn’t that so, my darling? . . .  Then what are they talking about—­these churches and churchmen?  It’s they who are the real divorcers—­trying to put those asunder whom God Himself has joined together.  That’s the plain sense of the matter, isn’t it?”

I was trembling with fear and expectation.  Perhaps it was the same with me as it had been before; perhaps I wanted (now more than ever) to believe what Martin was saying; perhaps I did not know enough to be able to answer him; perhaps my overpowering love and the position I stood in compelled me to agree.  But I could not help it if it seemed to me that his clear mind—­clear as a mountain river and as swift and strong—­was sweeping away all the worn-out sophistries.