murmured, holding his
hands tightly.

"But it is possible," he insisted. "All that we need is courage. You owe
nothing to your husband. You can leave him without remorse or a moment's
shame. Your life just now is wasted,--a precious human life. I want you,
Josephine. God knows how I want you!"

"You have my friendship--even my love. There, I have said it!" she
repeated, with a little sob, "my love."

His arms were suddenly around her. She shrank back in her chair. Her
terrified eyes invited and yet reproached him.

"Remember--oh, please remember!" she cried.

"What can I remember except one thing?" he whispered.

She held him away from her.

"You talk as though everything were possible between us. How can that be?
I have no joy in my husband, nor he in me--but I am married. We are not
in America."

He rose to his feet, a strong man trembling in every limb. He stood
before her, trying to talk reasonably, trying to plead his cause behind
the shelter of reasonable words.

"Let me tell you," he began, "why our divorce laws are so different
from yours. We believe that the worst breach of the Seventh Commandment
is the sin of an unloving kiss, the unwillingly given arms of a
shuddering wife, striving to keep the canons of the prayer book and
besmirching thereby her life with evil. We believe, on the other hand,
that there is no sin in love."

"If you and I were alone in the world!"

"If you are thinking of your friends," he pleaded, "they are more likely
to be proud of the woman who had the courage to break away from a
debasing union. Every one realises--what your husband is. He has been
unfaithful not only to you but to every friend he has ever had."

"Do I not know it!" she moaned. "Isn't the pain of it there in my heart,
hour by hour!"

His reasonableness was deserting him. Again he was the lover, begging for
his rights.

"Wipe him out of your mind, sweetheart," he begged. "I'll buy you from
him, if you like, or fight him for you, or steal you--I don't care which.
Anything sooner than let you go."

"I don't want to go," she confessed, afraid of her own words, shivering
with the meaning of them.

"You never shall," he continued, his voice gaining strength with his
rising hopes. "You've opened my lips and you must hear what is in my
heart. You are the one love of my life. My hours and days are empty, I
want you always by my side."

The love of him swept her away. Her head had fallen back, she saw his