your wife. This is final."

Ruthven stared at him as though hypnotised.

"Don't mistake me," added Selwyn, a trifle wearily. "I am not compelling
you to decency for the purpose of punishing _you_; men never trouble
themselves to punish vermin--they simply exterminate them, or they
retreat and avoid them. I merely mean that you shall never again bring
publicity and shame upon your wife--even though now, mercifully enough,
she has not the faintest idea that you are what a complacent law calls
her husband."

A slow blaze lighted up his eyes, and he got up from his chair.

"You decadent little beast!" he said slowly, "do you suppose that the
dirty accident of your intrusion into an honest man's life could
dissolve the divine compact of wedlock? Soil it--yes; besmirch it,
render it superficially unclean, unfit, nauseous--yes. But neither you
nor your vile code nor the imbecile law you invoked to legalise the
situation really ever deprived me of my irrevocable status and
responsibility. . . . I--even I--was once--for a while--persuaded that
it did; that the laws of the land could do this--could free me from a
faithless wife, and regularise her position in your household. The laws
of the land say so, and I--I said so at last--persuaded because I
desired to be persuaded. . . . It was a lie. My wife, shamed or
unshamed, humbled or unhumbled, true to her marriage vows or false to
them, now legally the wife of another, has never ceased to be my wife.
And it is a higher law that corroborates me--higher than you can
understand--a law unwritten because axiomatic; a law governing the very
foundation of the social fabric, and on which that fabric is absolutely
dependent for its existence intact. But"--with a contemptuous
shrug--"you won't understand; all you can understand is the
gratification of your senses and the fear of something interfering with
that gratification--like death, for instance. Therefore I am satisfied
that you understand enough of what I said to discontinue any legal
proceedings which would tend to discredit, expose, or cast odium on a
young wife very sorely stricken--very, very ill--whom God, in his mercy,
has blinded to the infamy where you have dragged her--under the law of
the land."

He turned on his heel, paced the little room once or twice, then swung
round again:

"Keep your filthy money--wrung from women and boys over card-tables.
Even if some blind, wormlike process of instinct stirred the shame in