oing. I've arranged to meet the lawyers in half-an-hour
from now. Good-bye, dear fellow. I will come up to town to see you,
or you must come down to see me, before the wind-up of the paper.
Good-bye."

The two men wrung each other's hand, then parted.

Ten minutes later George Bullen and Rose arrived. Amazed to see his
friend with an extraordinary beautiful girl, Ralph was presently
listening to all the wonderful story of their meeting, etc.

Later on, when, for a moment or two, the two men were alone together,
in the inner room, Ralph asked George what he proposed to do with the
beautiful girl?

"There is but one thing I can do," he replied. "I must marry her, and
that soon. It is no time, in the ordinary sense, to be thinking of
'marrying and giving in marriage,' yet, under the circumstances, I can
do no other. I care for her already, as I never cared for any woman,
and her affection for me is touching in its clingingness."

He smiled a little sadly, as he added:

"It is well that there is a little company of us here in London,
Believers in God, and therefore believers in marriage."

* * * * * *

George Bullen and Rose were married within the week of their landing in
England. The ceremony took place in a little company of believers, who
gathered on Sunday (old-count of time) and once on a week-night, in a
little hall that had been used for a Sunday School in the old days.
Sunday Schools, like many of the other religious institutions, of the
old days before the "Rapture," were quite a thing of the past.

Marriage was one of the things of the past. Some years before the
"Rapture," a booklet entitled "We-ism" had been published, in which the
author had unblushingly declared: "Women, _absolved from shame_,
servitude, and inequality, shall be enfranchised, owners of themselves
* * * We believe in the sacredness of the family and the home, _the
legitimacy of every child_, and the inalienable right of every woman to
the absolute possession of herself."

The doctrines and practice of "affinity," the "problem" plays, and
"sex" novels, of the first decade of the twentieth century, had all
materially helped to make the unregenerate mind and heart ready to
receive "free love" in its widest, grossest forms. While a certain
teaching of "Christian Science" had had an overwhelming power in the
same direction.[1]

All these forces had helped to make the doctrine of illicit love
ac