said his lordship, with fury in his looks.

"Certainly. That's exactly what I've come for," I said, and then I stated my business without more ado.

I told him what he had done to the woman who was ten thousand times too good to be his wife-torturing her with his cruelties, degrading her with his infidelities, subjecting her to the domination of his paramour, and finally striking her in the face like a coward and a cur.

"Liar!" he cried, fairly gasping in his rage. "You're a liar and your informant is a liar, too."

"Tommy," I said, "will you step outside for a moment?"

Tommy went out of the room at once, and the woman, who was now looking frightened, tried to follow him.

I stopped her. Rising from the table, I stepped over to the door and locked it.

"No, madam," I said. "I want you to see what takes place between his lordship and me."

The wretched woman fell back, but the man, grinding his teeth, came marching up to me.

"So you've come to fight me in my own house, have you?" he cried.

"Not at all," I answered. "A man fights his equal. I've come to _thrash you_."

That was enough for him, he lifted his hunting-crop to strike, but it didn't take long to get that from his hand or to paralyse the arm with which he was lunging out at me.

And then, seizing him by the white stock at his throat, I thrashed him.

I thrashed him as I should have thrashed vicious ape. I thrashed him while he fumed and foamed, and cursed and swore. I thrashed him while he cried for help, and then yelled with pain and whined for mercy. I thrashed him under the eyes of his ancestors, the mad, bad race he came from, and, him the biggest blackguard of them all. And then I flung him to the ground, bruised in every bone, and his hunting-crop after him.

"I hear you're going to court for an Act of Divorce," I said. "Pity you can't take something to back you, so take that, and say I gave it you."

I was turning towards the door when I heard a low, whining cry, like that of a captured she-bear. It was from the woman. The wretched creature was on her knees at the farthest corner of the room, apparently mumbling prayers, as if in terror that her own turn might be coming next.

In her sobbing fear I thought she looked more than ever like a poisonous snake, and I will not say that the old impulse to put my foot on it did not come back for a moment. But I only said as I passed, pointing to the writhing worm on the floor:

"Look at him, madame. I wish you joy of your nobleman, and him of you."

Then I opened the door, and notwithstanding the grim business I had been going through, I could have laughed at the scene outside.

There was old Tommy with his back to the dining-room door, his Glengarry awry on his tousled head, and his bandy legs stretched firmly apart, flourishing his big-headed blackthorn before the faces of the three powdered footmen, and inviting them to "come on."

"Come on, now, you bleating ould billy-goats, come on, come on!"

I was in no hurry to get away, but lit a cigar in front of the house while the chauffeur was starting the motor and Tommy was wiping his steaming forehead on the sleeve of his coat.

All the way home the old man talked without ceasing, sometimes to me, and sometimes to the world in general.

"You gave him a piece of your mind, didn't you?" he asked, with a wink of his "starboard eye."

"I believe I did," I answered.

"I allus said you would. 'Wait till himself is after coming home, and it'll be the devil sit up for some of them,' says I."

There was only one limitation to Tommy's satisfaction over our day's expedition--that he had not cracked the powdered skulls of "some o' them riddiclus dunkeys."

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]

ONE HUNDRED AND NINTH CHAPTER

Another month passed, and then began the last and most important phase of my too changeful story.

Every week Martin had been coming and going between Ellan and London, occupied when he was away with the business of his next Expedition (for which Parliament had voted a large sum), and when he was at home with reports, diaries, charts, maps, and photographs toward a book he was writing about his last one.

As for myself, I had been (or tried to think I had been) entirely happy.

With fresh air, new milk, a sweet bedroom, and above all, good and tender nursing (God bless Christian Ann for all she did for me!), my health had improved every day--or perhaps, by that heavenly hopefulness which goes with certain maladies, it had seemed to me to do so.

Yet mine was a sort of twilight happiness, nevertheless. Though the sun was always shining in my sky, it was frequently under eclipse. In spite of the sheltered life I lived in that home of charity and love, I was never entirely free from a certain indefinable uneasiness about my position.

I was always conscious, too, that Martin's mother and father, not to speak of Father Dan, were suffering from a similar feeling, for sometimes when we talked about the future their looks would answer to my thoughts, and it was just as if we were all silently waiting, waiting, waiting for some event that was to justify and rehabilitate me.

It came at last--for me with a startling suddenness.

One morning, nurse being out on an errand and Christian Ann patting her butter in the dairy, I was playing with baby on the rag-work hearthrug when our village newsman came to the threshold of the open door.

"Take a _Times_," he said. "You might as well be out of the world, ma'am, as not know what's going on in it."

I took one of his island newspapers, and after he had gone I casually glanced at it.

But what a shock it gave me! The first heading that flew in my face was--

"INSULAR DIVORCE BILL PASSED."

It was a report of the proceedings of the Supreme Court of our Ellan legislature, which (notwithstanding the opposition of its ecclesiastical members) had granted my husband's petition.

Perhaps I ought to have had a sense of immense relief. Or perhaps I should have gone down on my knees there and then, and thanked God that the miserable entanglement of the horrible marriage that had been forced upon me was at last at an end.

But no, I had only one feeling as the newspaper fell from my fingers--shame and humiliation, not for myself (for what did it matter about me, anyway?), but for Martin, whose name, now so famous, I had, through my husband's malice, been the means of dragging through the dust.

I remember that I thought I should never be able to look into my darling's face again, that when he came in the afternoon (as he always did) I should have to run away from him, and that all that was left to me was to hide myself and die.

But just as these wild thoughts were galloping through my brain I heard the sneck of the garden gate, and almost before I was aware of what else was happening Martin had come sweeping into the house like a rush of wind, thrown his arms around me, and covered my face, my neck, and my hands with kisses--never having done so before since I came to live at his mother's home.

"Such news! Such news!" he cried. "We are free, free, free!"

Then, seeing the newspaper at my feet on the floor, he said:

"Ah, I see you know already. I told them to keep everything away from you--all the miserable legal business. But no matter! It's over now. Of course it's shocking--perfectly shocking--that that squirming worm, after his gross infidelities, should have been able to do what he has done. But what matter about that either? He has done just what we wanted--what you couldn't do for yourself before I went away, your conscience forbidding you. The barrier that has divided us is down ...