His passionate voice was breaking; I thought my heart was breaking also.

"All I could do I did, but it came to nothing; and now you are here and you are unhappy, and though it is so late I want to help you, to rescue you, to drag you out of this horrible situation before I go away. Let me do it. Give me the right of one you care enough for to allow him to speak on your behalf."

I knew what that meant. I knew that I was tottering on the very edge of a precipice, and to save myself I tried to think of Father Dan, of Martin's mother, of my own mother, and since I could not speak I struggled to pray.

"Don't say you can't. If you do I shall go away a sorrowful man. I shall go at once too--to-night or to-morrow morning at latest, for my heart bleeds to look at you and I can't stay here any longer to see you suffer. It is not torture to me--it's hell!"

And then the irrepressible, overwhelming, inevitable moment came. Martin laid hold of my right hand and said in his tremulous voice:

"Mary ... Mary ... I ... I love you!"

I could hear no more. I could not think or pray or resist any longer.

The bitter struggle was at an end. Before I knew what I was doing I was dropping my head on to his breast and he with a cry of joy was gathering me in his arms.

I was his. He had taken his own. Nothing counted in the presence of our love. To be only we two together--that was everything. The world and the world's laws, the Church and the Canons of the Church were blotted out, forgotten, lost.

For some moments I hardly breathed. I was only conscious that over my head Martin was saying something that seemed to come to me with all the deep and wonderful whispers of his heart.

"Then it's true! It's true that you love me! Yes, it's true! It's true!

No one shall hurt you again. Never again! No, by the Lord God!"

And then suddenly--as suddenly as the moment of intoxication had come to me--I awoke from my delirium. Some little thing awakened me. I hardly know what it was. Perhaps it was only the striking of the cuckoo clock in my room.

"What are we doing?" I said.

Everything had rolled back on me--my marriage, Father Dan's warning, my promise to Martin's mother.

"Where are we?" I said.

"Hush! Don't speak," said Martin. "Let us think of nothing to-night--nothing except our love."

"Don't say that," I answered. "We are not free to love each other," and then, trying to liberate myself from his encircling arms I cried:

"God help me! God forgive me!"

"Wait!" said Martin, holding me a moment longer. "I know what you feel, and I'm not the man to want a girl to wrong her conscience. But there's one question I must ask you. If you _were_ free, could you love me then?"

"Don't ask me that. I must not answer it."

"You must and shall," said Martin. "Could you?"

"Yes."

"That's enough for me--enough for to-night anyway. Have no fear. All shall be well. Go to your room now."

He raised me to my feet and led me back to the foot of the balcony, and there he kissed my hand and let me go.

"Good night!" he said softly.

"Good night!" I answered.

"God bless you, my pure sweet girl!"

At the next moment I was in my room, lying face down on my bed--seeing no hope on any side, and sobbing my heart out for what might have been but for the hard law of my religion and the cruel tangle of my fate.

SIXTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

Next morning, Monday morning, while I was breakfasting in my bedroom, Price came with a message from Martin to say that he was going into the glen and wished to know if I would go with him.

I knew perfectly what that meant. He wished to tell me what steps he intended to take towards my divorce, and my heart trembled with the thought of the answer I had to give him--that divorce for me, under any circumstances, was quite impossible.

Sorry as I was for myself I was still more sorry for Martin. I felt like a judge who had to pronounce sentence upon him--dooming his dearest hopes to painful and instant death.

I could hear him on the lawn with Tommy the Mate, laughing like a boy let loose from school, and when I went down to him he greeted me with a cry of joy that was almost heart-breaking.

Our way to the glen was through a field of grass, where the dew was thick, and, my boots being thin, Martin in his high spirits wished to carry me across, and it was only with an effort that I prevented him from doing so.

The glen itself when we reached it (it was called Glen Raa) was almost cruelly beautiful that day, and remembering what I had to do in it I thought I should never be able to get it out of my sight--with its slumberous gloom like that of a vast cathedral, its thick arch of overhanging boughs through which the morning sunlight was streaming slantwards like the light through the windows of a clerestory, its running water below, its rustling leaves above, and the chirping of its birds on every side, making a sound that was like the chanting of a choir in some far-off apse and the rumbling of their voices in the roof.

Two or three times, as we walked down the glen towards a port (Port Raa) which lay at the seaward end of it. Martin rallied me on the settled gravity of my face and then I had to smile, though how I did so I do not know, for every other minute my heart was in my mouth, and never more so than when, to make me laugh, he rattled away in the language of his boyhood, saying:

"Isn't this stunning? Splendiferous, eh?"

When we came out at the mouth of the port, where a line of little stunted oaks leaned landward as with the memory of many a winter's storm, Martin said:

"Let us sit down here."

We sat on the sloping bank, with the insects ticking in the grass, the bees humming in the air, the sea fowl screaming in the sky, the broad sea in front, and the little bay below, where the tide, which was going out, had left behind it a sharp reef of black rocks covered with sea-weed.

A pleasure-steamer passed at that moment with its flags flying, its awnings spread, its decks crowded with excursionists, and a brass hand playing one of Sousa's marches, and as soon as it had gone, Martin said:

"I've been thinking about our affair, Mary, how to go to work and all that, and of course the first thing we've got to do is to get a divorce."

I made no answer, and I tried not to look at him by fixing my eyes upon the sea.

"You have evidence enough, you know, and if you haven't there's Price--she has plenty. So, since you've given me the right to speak for you, dear, I'm going to speak to your father first"

I must have made some half-articulate response, for not understanding me he said:

"Oh, I know he'll be a hard nut to crack. He won't want to hear what I've got to say, but he has got to hear it. And after all you're his daughter, and if he has any bowels of compassion ..."

Again I must have made some effort to speak, for he said:

"Yes, he's ill, but he has only to set Curphy to work and the lawyer will do the rest."