laughed in her heart.

"He will lift his hand to me," she thought, "and then we shall see."

But he seemed to read her purpose, and determined to defeat it. She
might starve him, herself, and their child, but the revenge she had
set her mind upon she should not have.

Yet to live with her and to contain himself at every brutal act or
bestial word was more than he could trust himself to do, and he
determined to fly away. Let it be anywhere--anywhere, if only out of
the torture of her presence. One place was like another in Man, for
go where he would to any corner of the island, there she would surely
follow him.

Old Thurston Coobragh, of Ballacreggan, gave him work at draining a
flooded meadow. It was slavery that no other Christian man would do,
but for a month Stephen Orry worked up to his waist in water, and
lived on barley bread and porridge. At the end of his job he had six
and thirty shillings saved, and with this money in his pocket, and
the child in his arms, he hurried down to the harbor at Ramsey, where
an Irish packet lay ready to sail.

Could he have a passage to Ireland? Certainly he could, but where was
his license?

Stephen Orry had never heard until then that before a man could leave
the Isle of Man he must hold a license permitting him to do so.

"Go to the High Bailiff," said the captain of the packet; and to the
High Bailiff Stephen Orry went.

"I come for a license to go away into Ireland," he said.

"Very good. But where is your wife?" said the High Bailiff. "Are you
leaving her behind you to be a burden on the parish?"

At that Stephen's heart sank, for he saw that his toil had been
wasted, and that his savings were worthless. Doomed he was for all
his weary days to live with the woman who hated him. He was bound to
her, he was leashed to her, and he must go begrimed and bedraggled to
the dregs of life with her. So he went back home, and hid his money
in a hole in the thatch of the roof, that the touch of it might vex
his memory no more.

And then it flashed upon him that what he was now suffering from this
woman was after all no more than the complement and counterpart of
what Rachel had suffered from him in the years behind them. It was
just--yes, it Was just--and because he was a man and Rachel a woman,
it was less than he deserved. So thinking, he sat himself down in his
misery with resignation if not content, vowing never to lift his hand
to the woman, however tormented, and neve