all rivalry.

The lines of this third article which first caught his eye comprised the
opening sentence of the second paragraph, and contained these words:

It appears, from the narrative which will be found in another part of
our columns, that this unfortunate woman married, in the spring of
the year 18--, one Mr. Fergus Duncan, of Glendarn, in the Highlands of
Scotland...

The letters swam and mingled together under his eyes before he could
go on to the next sentence. His wife exhibited as an object for public
compassion in the _Times_ newspaper! On the brink of the dreadful
discovery that was advancing on him, his mind reeled back, and a deadly
faintness came over him. There was water on a side-table--he drank a
deep draught of it--roused himself--seized on the newspaper with both
hands, as if it had been a living thing that could feel the desperate
resolution of his grasp, and read the article through, sentence by
sentence, word by word.

The subject was the Law of Divorce, and the example quoted was the
example of his wife.

At that time England stood disgracefully alone as the one civilized
country in the world having a divorce law for the husband which was not
also a divorce law for the wife. The writer in the _Times_ boldly and
eloquently exposed this discreditable anomaly in the administration of
justice; hinted delicately at the unutterable wrongs suffered by Mrs.
Duncan; and plainly showed that she was indebted to the accident of
having been married in Scotland, and to her consequent right of appeal
to the Scotch tribunals, for a full and final release from the tie that
bound her to the vilest of husbands, which the English law of that day
would have mercilessly refused.

He read that. Other men might have gone on to the narrative extracted
from the Scotch newspaper. But at the last word of the article _he_
stopped.

The newspaper, and the unread details which it contained, lost all hold
on his attention in an instant, and in their stead, living and burning
on his mind, like the Letters of Doom on the walls of Belshazzar, there
rose up in judgment against him the last words of a verse in the Gospel
of Saint Luke--

_"Whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband, commiteth
adultery."_

He had preached from these words, he had warned his hearers, with the
whole strength of the fanatical sincerity that was in him, to beware of
prevaricating with the prohibition which that verse contain