“But if I want to make him mine?  If I want to lift him up and assure his future?  If I want to assume paternity—­claim it, adopt him as my son—­to succeed me some day?”

“He must decide for himself whether that’s the high-water mark for his future life—­to be your adopted son.  We can’t have it all our own way in this world—­not even you, I suppose.  A child has to have a mother as well as a father, and a mother’s got her rights in her child.  Even the law allows that.”

“Who’d deny them, Sabina?  You’re possessed, as you always were, with the significance of legal marriage.  You don’t know that marriage is merely a human contrivance and, nine times out of ten, an infernally clumsy makeshift and a long-drawn pretence.  Like every other human shift, it is a thing that gets out-grown by the advance of humanity towards higher ideals and cleaner liberties.  We are approaching a time when the edifice will be shaken to its mouldering foundations, and presently, while the Church and the State are wrangling and quibbling, as they soon must be, over the loathsome divorce laws, these mandarins will wake up to find the marriage laws themselves are being threatened by a new generation sick of the archaic tomfoolery that controls them.  If you could only take a larger view and not let yourself be bound down by your own experience—­”

“You’d better go,” she said.  “If you’d spoken, so twelve years ago on Golden Cap, and not hid your heart and lied to me and promised what you never meant to perform, I’d not be walking the world a lonely, despised woman to-day.  And law, or no law, the law of the natural child is the law of the land—­cruel and vile though it may be.”

“I’ll go, Sabina; but I must say what I want to say, first.  I must stand up for Abel—­even against you.  Childish impressions and dislikes can be rooted out if taken in time; if left to grow, they get beyond reach.  So I ask you to think of him.  And don’t pretend to yourself that my friendship is dangerous, or can do him anything but good.  I’m very different from what I was.  Life hasn’t gone over me for nothing.  I know what’s right well enough, and I know what I owe your son and my son, and I want to make up to him and more than make up to him for his disadvantages.  Don’t prevent me from doing that.  Give me a chance, Sabina.  Give me a chance to be a good father to him.  Your word is law with him, and if you left Bridetown and took him away from all the rumours and unkind things he may hear here, it would let his mind grow empty of me for a few years; and then, when he’s older and more sensible, I think I could win him.”

“You want us away from this place.”

“I do.  I never should have spoken to you until I knew you wished it, but for this complication; but since the boy is growing up prejudiced against me, I do feel that some strong effort should be taken to nip his young hatred in the bud—­for his sake, Sabina.”