e seen him so excited. There was a wild look in his
eyes and his voice was quivering like the string of a bow.

"Poor old Father Dan! He's an old angel, with as good a heart as ever
beat under a cassock. But what a slave a man may be to the fetish of his
faith! Only think what he says, my darling! The guilty party! I'll never
believe you are the guilty party, but consider! The guilty party may
never marry! No good clergyman of any Christian Church in the world dare
marry her! What an infamy! Ask yourself what the churches are here for.
Aren't they here to bring salvation to the worst of sinners? Yet they
cast out the woman who has sinned against her marriage vow--denying her
access to the altar and turning her out of doors--though she may have
repented a thousand times, with bitter, bitter tears!"

He walked two or three paces in front of the garden-house and then came
back to me with flaming eyes.

"But that's not your case, anyway," he said. "Father Dan knows perfectly
that your marriage was no marriage at all--only a sordid bit of
commercial bargaining, in which your husband gave you his bad name for
your father's unclean money. It was no marriage in any other sense
either, and might have been annulled if there had been any common
honesty in annulment. And now that it has tumbled to wreck and ruin, as
anybody might have seen it would do, you are told that you are bound to
it to the last day and hour of your life! After all you have gone
through--all you have suffered--never to know another hour of happiness
as long as you live! While your husband, notwithstanding his brutalities
and infidelities, is free to do what he likes, to marry whom he pleases!
How stupid! How disgusting! how damnable!"

His passionate voice was breaking, he could scarcely control it.

"Oh, I know what they'll say. It will be the old, old song, 'Whom God
hath joined together.' That's what this old Church of ours has been
saying for centuries to poor women with broken hearts. Has the Church
itself got a heart to break? No--nothing but its cast-iron laws which
have been broken a thousand times and nobody a penny the worse."

"But I wonder," he continued, "I wonder why these churchmen, who would
talk about the impossibility of putting asunder those whom God has
joined together, don't begin by asking themselves how and when and where
God joins them. Is it in church, when they stand before the altar and
are asked a few questions, and give a few