mixture of force and persuasion which avails itself
of a woman's instinctive and cultivated dread of disputes and raised
voices and the betrayal of contention to strangers, by the sheer tiring
down of nerves and of sleepless body and by threats of an immediate
divorce and a campaign of ruin against me, these three men had obliged
Mary to leave Martens and go with them to Southampton, and thence they
took her in Justin's yacht, the _Water-Witch_, to Waterford, and thence
by train to a hired house, an adapted old castle at Mirk near Crogham in
Mayo. There for all practical purposes she was a prisoner. They took
away her purse, and she was four miles from a pillar-box and ten from a
telegraph office. This house they had taken furnished without seeing it
on the recommendation of a London agent, and in the name of Justin's
solicitor. Thither presently went Lady Ladislaw, and an announcement
appeared in the _Times_ that Justin and Lady Mary had gone abroad for a
time and that no letters would be forwarded.

I have never learnt the particulars of that abduction, but I imagine
Mary astonished, her pride outraged, humiliated, helpless, perplexed and
maintaining a certain outward dignity. Moreover, as I was presently to
be told, she was ill. Guy and Philip were, I believe, the moving spirits
in the affair; Tarvrille was their apologetic accomplice, Justin took
the responsibility for what they did and bore the cost, he was bitterly
ashamed to have these compulsions applied to his wife, but full now of a
gusty fury against myself. He loved Mary still with a love that was
shamed and torn and bleeding, but his ruling passion was that infinitely
stronger passion than love in our poor human hearts, jealousy. He was
prepared to fight for her now as men fight for a flag, tearing it to
pieces in the struggle. He meant now to keep Mary. That settled, he was
prepared to consider whether he still loved her or she him....

Now here it may seem to you that we are on the very verge of romance.
Here is a beautiful lady carried off and held prisoner in a wild old
place, standing out half cut off from the mainland among the wintry
breakers of the west coast of Ireland. Here is the lover, baffled but
insistent. Here are the fierce brothers and the stern dragon husband,
and you have but to make out that the marriage was compulsory, irregular
and, on the ground of that irregularity, finally dissoluble, to furnish
forth a theme for Marriott Watson in