you should offer her the chance to escape from her present bondage and to live honestly for the future." "Divorce her, and let the beast marry her!" cried Lionel, bringing down his clenched fist upon the table. "If you do that you endanger your own soul and hers." “That is the way with you priests. You preach an impossible life, a type of existence only practicable for monks and nuns," violently. "But whatever is possible for me is possible for you. You have the same sources of strength that I have. You are a baptized Christian, however much you may have tried to deny it since." "Oh, that's all very fine! But does the average man do the sort of thing you are trying to make me do?" 66 Certainly he does, and far more frequently than you have any idea of. Thank God the world is full of souls who have learned, or are learning, the meaning of sacrifice. They don't write to the Daily Mail about their spiritual experiences, so we don't hear much of them. But they exist for all that.” "Sacrifice! Renounce! Give up! Is that all the comfort you have to offer?" Your "By no means. But it is my message to you to-day. Do this thing if you can compel your will to it. mercy will make that wretched woman believe in the possibility of God's. And there is more. There is a thing which, in all honesty, I think I ought to tell you. Whether or no you divorce your wife, Miss Wilmot will never marry you." Lionel sprang to his feet. "Ah! that is where you 66 She may have are mistaken!" he cried impetuously. told you that—” "I do not go by anything that she has told me.' "What do you go by?" My own personal observation. Even if your wife were dead she would not marry you." "If you were not a priest, I would ask you to bet on it," said the other, with a half laugh. "You don't know what a man can do with a girl! She may have been well primed up by a priest, she may have had all her natural instincts carefully restrained, but her resistance goes down before a love like mine." "Hers will not. Because it is her natural instincts which are against you." Lionel stood very still for a minute. "She told me that there was nobody else," he said tremulously. There was no reply. "I suppose you think there is some one else?” 66 "I give you my opinion. I withhold my reasons." There was a silence in the room. Gladwyn walked to the window and stared forth unseeing. "Will you tell me one thing," asked Father Conroy. "Have you mentioned your meeting with your wife?" "Not to a soul." "That is much to your credit. You did not tell Mrs. Bardsley?" "No. You see, I left them together-Laura and Mrs. Bardsley-and went up to my room. Had I spoken at once, the moment after seeing her, I don't think I could have helped blurting it out. But, by the time she was gone, I had had time to think: and the case seemed too serious for hasty action." "Quite so. Now make me a promise. Give me your word to take no action for four and twenty hours from now. Come to me again to-morrow afternoon, having thought things out honestly with yourself. And in the meantime say nothing to anybody. If you tell Mrs. Bardsley that you wish to see me again, I am sure that she will welcome a slight extension of your visit. And during those hours refrain from distressing Miss Wilmot. Let her see that you respect her scruples, even if you cannot agree with them." Lionel considered. He longed to be up and doing. But delay gave him more time in the society of, or, at least, in the same house as the beloved. After some hesitation he promised. They went out together to the gate in the lovely summer evening. As they stood there, a dog-cart, with a spanking horse, drove up, and stopped at the gate of the Fletcher cottage, just up the road. A small boy in livery sprang down and ran to the horse's head, and the huge lumbering form of Dan Trent was seen to descend. "That is Trent," said Father Conroy. 66 That?" Gladwyn took a step forward. He gazed upon the inflamed face, the brutalized expression, the shambling gait. He thought of Laura as she had been when he married her of her daintiness, her fastidious nicety, her dislike to anything coarse or vulgar. He shuddered from head to foot. " CHAPTER XXVII RELEASE "Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate. "There was a Door to which I found no key: THROUGHOUT that evening Lionel continued in a charming mood. One of his accomplishments was to play the piano, and thus he greatly delighted Mrs. Bardsley. She found him more and more pleasing as the hours wore on. Presently she broached the subject of Jem's idea of going abroad, and began to ask questions about Golden Ridge. This was talk in which Vernon could join, and together they described the country, the people, the conditions of life. At about half-past nine Miles Umfraville came in for a few minutes. He had wanted to see Jem about the final arrangements for the Flower Show and was vexed to find that he was away. He greeted Mr. Gladwyn with his usually easy cordiality and sat down by Vernon talking to her of her exhibits with a charming air of friendship and intimacy which her jealous suitor was quick to notice. Sir Miles Umfraville. No doubt it was this that Father Conroy had in mind. A baronet--young, eligible, quite tolerably good-looking! Anguish seized upon him. The thing was evidently as yet in its earlier stages. But he knew well enough that, long before she knows herself to be definitely in love with one man, a girl will refuse others instinctively. And that was exactly what the Father had said: "Her natural instincts are against you." Miles, who came for a few minutes, stayed an hour and a half: and it is true to say that every minute of that hour and a half was torture to poor Lionel. The courtesy with which the baronet took leave of him, and invited him to the Flower Show, should he still be at Carronlea the following afternoon, was to him like bitter irony. The hopes that had been so high as he rode to Wishfield were now broken and trailing in the dust. He went to bed, but not to rest. All night long he never slept. And, to his own astonishment, his thoughts were not of Vernon, but of Laura. Memory awoke, as if to be revenged upon him for the years that she had slumbered. Perhaps it was the return to England, and English ways, which had wrenched back his mind to the earlier days, when he and she had lived so gayly, so utterly without thought for the morrow. He thought of her sitting before her toilet-table, in their London flat-the profusion of silver brushes and bottles, the maid combing out the long lustrous pale red hair of one evening in particular, when he had been jealous quite keenly jealous-for a brief few days. He saw himself kneeling at her feet, his arms about her, his face hidden in the white laces and blue ribboned tuckers of her breast, telling her how much |