tically to an end. This
is the first article in the woman's charter, and without it marriage
itself has neither value nor sanctity. She seemed to hear sentences of
this sort, in her own voice, echoing about windy halls, producing waves
of emotion on a sea of strained faces--women's faces, set and pale, like
that of Madeleine Verrier. She had never actually made such a speech,
but she felt she would like to have made it.

What was she going to do? No doubt Roger would resent her coming--would
probably refuse to see her, as she had once refused to see him. Well,
she must try and act with dignity and common sense; she must try and
persuade him to recognize her good faith, and to get him to listen to
what she proposed. She had her plan for Roger's reclamation, and was
already in love with it. Naturally, she had never meant permanently to
hurt or injure Roger! She had done it for his good as well as her own.
Yet even as she put this plea forward in the inner tribunal of
consciousness, she knew that it was false.

_"You have murdered a life!"_ Well, that was what prejudiced and
hide-bound persons like Alfred Boyson said, and no doubt always would
say. She could not help it; but for her own dignity's sake, that moral
dignity in which she liked to feel herself enwrapped, she would give as
little excuse for it as possible.

Then, as she stood looking eastward, a strange thought struck her. Once
on that farther shore and she would be Roger's wife again--an English
subject, and Roger's wife. How ridiculous, and how intolerable! When
shall we see some real comity of nations in these matters of
international marriage and divorce?

She had consulted her lawyers in New York before starting; on Roger's
situation first of all, but also on her own. Roger, it seemed, might
take certain legal steps, once he was aware of her being again on
English ground. But, of course, he would not take them. "It was never me
he cared for--only Beatty!" she said to herself with a bitter
perversity. Still the thought of returning within the range of the old
obligations, the old life, affected her curiously. There were hours,
especially at night, when she felt shut up with thoughts of Roger and
Beatty--her husband and her child--just as of old.

How, in the name of justice, was she to blame for Roger's illness? Her
irritable thoughts made a kind of grievance against him of the attack of
pneumonia which she was told had injured his health. He must have