She had heard about my marriage and the ruin it had fallen to; my disappearance from home and the circumstances of my recovery; my husband’s petition for divorce and the disclosures that had followed it.

But sad and serious and even tragic as all this might be, it was as nothing (in the eyes of the Church and of God) compared with the awful gravity of the step I now contemplated—­a second marriage while my husband was still alive.

She had nothing to say against Martin.  Except the facts that concerned myself she had never heard a word to his discredit.  She could even understand those facts, though she could not condone them.  Perhaps he had seen my position (married to a cruel and unfaithful husband) and his pity had developed into love—­she had heard of such happenings.

“But only think, my child, what an abyss he is driving you to!  He asks you to break your marriage vows! . . .  Oh, yes, yes, I can see what he will say—­that pressure was put upon you and you were too young to know what you were doing.  That may be true, but it isn’t everything.  I thought it wrong, cruelly wrong, that your father should choose a husband for you without regard to your wish and will.  But it was you, not your father, who made your marriage vows, and you can never get away from that—­never!”

Those marriage vows were sacred; our blessed Saviour had said they could never be broken, and our holy Church had taken His Commandment for law.

“Think, my child, only think what would happen to the world if every woman who has made an unhappy marriage were to do as you think of doing.  What a chaos!  What an uprooting of all the sacred ties of home and family!  And how women would suffer—­women and children above all.  Don’t you see that, my daughter?”

The security of society lay in the sanctity of marriage; the sanctity of marriage lay in its indissolubility; and its indissolubility centred in the fact that God was a party to it.

“Perhaps you are told that your marriage will be your own concern only and that God and the Church have nothing to do with it.  But if women had believed that in all ages, how different the world would be to-day!  Oh, believe me, your marriage vow is sacred, and you cannot break it without sin—­mortal sin, my daughter.”

The moral of all this was that I must renounce Martin Conrad, wash my heart clean of my love of him, shun the temptation of seeing him again, and if possible forget him altogether.

“It will be hard.  I know it will he hard, but. . . .”

“It will be quite impossible,” I said as well as I could, for my very lips were trembling.

I had been shaken to the depths of my soul by what the Reverend Mother said, but remembering Martin’s warning I now struggled to resist her.

“Two years ago, while I was living with my husband I tried to do that and I couldn’t,” I said.  “And if I couldn’t do it then, when the legal barrier stood between us, how can I do it now when the barrier is gone?”