s perilous situation.

And even in the sad cases where a woman has sown real wild oats in the
man's sense of the word, how different the little moral rules and
regulations which we keep for these occasions would appear in the face
of an immediate and violent death. I heard not long ago of a very sad
story which bears this out. A man very narrowly escaped death from
drowning, shortly after he had broken his engagement with a girl he
genuinely loved, on her confessing to him that, many years before, she
had once yielded to the importunities of a passionate lover. I do not
know what were his emotions in the awful moment when the waters closed
over him, and he was experiencing that horrible fight for breath which
those who have known it describe as the most terrible sensation
conceivable. Apparently his hairbreadth escape from death tore from his
eyes the swathings of conventional opinion with which he had been
blinded. Instead of regarding himself as a deeply wronged man he
realised that he had behaved horribly to the unfortunate girl, who had
thus been doubly outraged by his sex. He sought her at once and begged
to be taken back again, but she happened to be a woman of some spirit,
and she refused to trust herself to a man of such narrow views, and
given to such harsh judgment.

Of course this treatment increased his love a thousandfold. It obsessed
him to a painful degree, and in the end his desperate entreaties
prevailed on her deep affection for him and she relented. Their marriage
was not very happy, as may be imagined; they both loved to madness and
the ghost of that dead passion stood ever between them, an invisible,
poisonous presence that killed their joy in each other. After a time a
deep melancholy settled on the woman, and she allowed some trifling
illness to take such a hold on her that it caused her death.

When she was dying, I am told, she said to her faithful friend: 'If ever
you meet another woman who has made one little slip--a thing which at
the time seemed so natural and inevitable as not to be sin at all--tell
her never _never_ to confess it to the man she is going to marry, least
of all if she loves him. If that confession doesn't part them
altogether, it will always be between them. One does it wishing to be
straight, but it's the most dreadful mistake a woman can make.'

Her wish to be straight had cost this poor woman not only her whole
life's happiness, and her very life itself, but the happin