And that compact has been kept?"

"Yes."

"Then it's all right! Don't be afraid. You shall be free. Come in and
let me tell you how! Come in, come in!"

He took me back into the boudoir. I had no power to resist him. His face
was as pale as death, but his eyes were shining. He made me sit down and
then sat on the table in front of me.

"Listen!" he said. "When I bought my ship from the Lieutenant we signed
a deed, a contract, as a witness before all men that he would give me
his ship and I would give him some money. But if after all he hadn't
given me his ship what would our deed have been? Only so much waste
paper."

It was the same with my marriage. If it had been an honest contract, the
marriage service would have been a witness before God that we meant to
live together as man and wife. But I never had, therefore what was the
marriage service? Only an empty ceremony!

"That's the plain sense of the matter, isn't it?" he cried. "I defy any
priest in the world to prove the contrary."

"Well?"

"Well, don't you see what it comes to? You are free--morally free at all
events. You can come to me. You must, too. I daren't leave you in this
house any longer. I shall take you to London and fix you up there, and
then, when I tome back from the Antarctic . . ."

He was glowing with joy, but a cold hand suddenly seized me, for I had
remembered all the terrors of excommunication as Father Dan had
described them.

"But Martin," I said, "would the Church accept that?"

"What matter whether it would or wouldn't? Our consciences would be
clear. There would be no sin, and what you were saying this morning
would not apply."

"But if I left my husband I couldn't marry you, could I?"

"Perhaps not."

"Then the Church would say that I was a sinful woman living a sinful
life, wouldn't it?"

"But you wouldn't be."

"All the same the Church would say so, and if it did I should be cut out
of communion, and if I were cut out of communion I should be cast out of
the Church, and if I were cast out of the Church . . . what would become
of me then?"

"But, my dear, dear girl," said Martin, "don't you see that this is not
the same thing at all? It is only a case of a ceremony. And why should
a mere ceremony--even if we cannot do away with it--darken a woman's
life for ever?"

My heart was yearning for love, but my soul was crying out for
salvation; and not being able to answer him for myself, I told him what
Father Dan had