atisfactory understanding to-day as to make further conferences
superfluous. This arrangement is with her entire consent, or rather,
is the fulfilment of her expressed wish. I must protest also against
your designation of my daughter as your wife. She is not such in the
full sense of the term. She has never appeared with you publicly as
your wife, but by her desertion of you at the very altar she
emphatically showed that she realised her mistake at once and
repudiated it."

"Desertion is no cause for divorce, bishop," Emmet returned, with an
ugly gleam in his eyes, "either in your Church or in mine. Your
daughter's treatment of me has been such that the only amends she can
make is to acknowledge our relationship and act accordingly."

"Come, come, Mr. Emmet," the other retorted, "I need scarcely remind
you how far my daughter has already atoned for her mistake by helping
you to realise your ambition, by suggesting it, in fact, and by lending
you books for your instruction. It seems to me that a manly man would
acknowledge this frankly, that he would not strive to hold the woman to
the letter of the agreement after discovering that the spirit was no
longer there to give it life."

"I could have won without her," the mayor declared hoarsely.

The bishop smiled with exasperating, ironical amusement. "We will
waive that point, then, Mr. Emmet. It suggests a fruitless discussion,
that would merely serve to distract us from the main question. I was
about to say, when you interrupted me, that if you always considered
your marriage as binding as you now feign to consider it, you should
have come to me and announced the fact. By your acquiescence in my
daughter's desertion, you tacitly admitted that you released her, that
you had nothing to announce. If you did not consider then that the
marriage was binding, you cannot begin to do so at this late hour."

"Allow me to say that your daughter considered it binding," Emmet put
in shrewdly. "She did not repudiate her mistake, as you call it, by
leaving me at the altar. On the contrary, she intended all along to
acknowledge our marriage as soon as I should be elected mayor."

"She did not, perhaps, realise the full significance of her instinctive
action," the bishop answered. "A woman is a mystery to herself no less
than to others. I am putting the case to you as man to man, hoping to
kindle a spark of generous understanding in your heart. Could any
woman who re