coming and going between Ellan and London,
occupied when he was away with the business of his next Expedition (for
which Parliament had voted a large sum), and when he was at home with
reports, diaries, charts, maps, and photographs toward a book he was
writing about his last one.

As for myself, I had been (or tried to think I had been) entirely happy.
With fresh air, new milk, a sweet bedroom, and above all, good and
tender nursing (God bless Christian Ann for all she did for me!), my
health had improved every day--or perhaps, by that heavenly hopefulness
which goes with certain maladies, it had seemed to me to do so.

Yet mine was a sort of twilight happiness, nevertheless. Though the sun
was always shining in my sky, it was frequently under eclipse. In spite
of the sheltered life I lived in that home of charity and love, I was
never entirely free from a certain indefinable uneasiness about my
position.

I was always conscious, too, that Martin's mother and father, not to
speak of Father Dan, were suffering from a similar feeling, for
sometimes when we talked about the future their looks would answer to my
thoughts, and it was just as if we were all silently waiting, waiting,
waiting for some event that was to justify and rehabilitate me.

It came at last--for me with a startling suddenness.

One morning, nurse being out on an errand and Christian Ann patting her
butter in the dairy, I was playing with baby on the rag-work hearthrug
when our village newsman came to the threshold of the open door.

"Take a _Times_," he said. "You might as well be out of the world,
ma'am, as not know what's going on in it."

I took one of his island newspapers, and after he had gone I casually
glanced at it.

But what a shock it gave me! The first heading that flew in my face
was--

"INSULAR DIVORCE BILL PASSED."

It was a report of the proceedings of the Supreme Court of our Ellan
legislature, which (notwithstanding the opposition of its ecclesiastical
members) had granted my husband's petition.

Perhaps I ought to have had a sense of immense relief. Or perhaps I
should have gone down on my knees there and then, and thanked God that
the miserable entanglement of the horrible marriage that had been forced
upon me was at last at an end.

But no, I had only one feeling as the newspaper fell from my
fingers--shame and humiliation, not for myself (for what did it matter
about me, anyway?), but for Martin, whose name, n