, but if every woman who has made a
rue-bargain were to try to get out of it your way where would the world
be, I wonder? Perhaps you think you could marry somebody else, but you
couldn't. What decent man wants to marry a divorced woman even if she
_is_ the injured party?"

"Then you think I ought to submit--tamely submit to such infidelities?"
I asked.

"Sakes alive," said Aunt Bridget, "what else can you do? Men are
polygamous animals, and we women have to make up our minds to it.
Goodness knows I had to when the old colonel used to go hanging around
those English barmaids at the 'Cock and Hen.' Be a little blind,
girl--that's what nine wives out of ten have to be every day and every
night and all the world over."

"Will that make my husband any better?" I asked.

"I don't say it will," said Aunt Bridget. "It will make _you_ better,
though. What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve for. That's
something, isn't it?"

When I went to bed that night my whole soul was in revolt. The Church,
the law, society, parental power, all the conventions and
respectabilities seemed to be in a conspiracy to condone my husband's
offence and to make me his scapegoat, doomed to a life of hypocrisy and
therefore immorality and shame. I would die rather than endure it. Yes,
I would die that very day rather than return to my husband's house and
go through the same ordeal again.

But next morning when I thought of Martin, as I always did on first
awakening, I told myself that I would live and be a clean woman in my
own eyes _whatever the World might think of me_.

Martin was now my only refuge, so I would tell him everything. It would
be hard to do that, but no matter, I would crush down my modesty and
tell him everything. And then, whatever he told me to do I should do it.

I knew quite well what my resolution meant, what it implied and
involved, but still I thought, "_Whatever he tells me to do I will do
it_."

I remembered what the Countess in Rome had said about a life of
"complete emancipation" as an escape from unhappy marriage, and even yet
I thought "_Whatever he tells me to do I will do it_."

After coming to that conclusion I felt more at ease and got up to dress.

It was a beautiful morning, and I looked down into the orchard, where
the apples were reddening under the sunshine and the gooseberries were
ripening under their hanging boughs, when in the quiet summer air I
heard a footstep approaching.

An elde