d been a true wife to him before that?"

"Yes, in all that concerned the code."

"Well?--Well, was not that enough? She did what she could, as long as
she could." She leaned far back in the chair, her eyes half shut.

"Don't you think--as a woman, not as a theorist--that Mrs. Anson might
at least have come to him when he was dying?"

"It would only have been uncomfortable for her. She had no part in his
life; she could not feel with him. She could do nothing."

"But suppose she had loved him? By that memory, then, of the time when
they took each other for better or for worse, until death should part
them?"

"Death did part them when the code banished him; when he passed from a
free world into a cage. Besides, we are talking about people marrying,
not about their loving."

"I will admit," I said, with a little raw irony, "that I was not exact
in definition."

Here I got a glimpse into her nature which rendered after events not
so marvellous to me as they might seem to others. She thought a moment
quite indolently, and then continued: "You make one moralise like George
Eliot. Marriage is a condition, but love must be an action. The one is a
contract, the other is complete possession, a principle--that is, if it
exists at all. I do not know."

She turned the rings round mechanically on her finger; and among them
was a wedding-ring! Her voice had become low and abstracted, and now
she seemed to have forgotten my presence, and was looking out upon the
humming darkness round us, through which now and again there rang a
boatswain's whistle, or the loud laugh of Blackburn, telling of a joyous
hour in the smoking-room.

I am now about to record an act of madness, of folly, on my part. I
suppose most men have such moments of temptation, but I suppose, also,
that they act more sensibly and honourably than I did then. Her hand had
dropped gently on the chair-arm, near to my own, and though our fingers
did not touch, I felt mine thrilled and impelled toward hers. I do not
seek to palliate my action. Though the man I believed to be her husband
was below, I yielded myself to an imagined passion for her. In that
moment I was a captive. I caught her hand and kissed it hotly.

"But you might know what love is," I said. "You might learn--learn of
me. You--"

Abruptly and with surprise she withdrew her hand, and, without any
visible emotion save a quicker pulsation of her breast, which might have
been indignation, spoke. "Bu