“No, certainly not, my dear boy. No such plan can be entertained for a single moment. We do not know, since that scoundrel’s return, whether Odalite is free to marry. Nor shall we ever know until the date of Lady Mary Anglesea’s death is definitely ascertained. If she did not die until the twenty-fifth of August, 18—, as the fellow insists that she did not, then was the ceremony he went through with the Widow Wright no marriage at all, and the rites performed at All Faith between himself and Odalite legal and binding. You know that as well as I do, Le.”
The young man’s face grew dark with despair.
“In any case you will never give her up to him!” he cried.
“Never, so help me Heaven! Nor can I give her to you, Le, until she shall be proved to be free.”
“I thought, when the judge remanded her to your custody and dismissed the case, it was—his action was equivalent to declaring her free.”
“He had no power to do that. But in a doubtful case, when the self-styled ‘husband’ cannot prove his right to the woman in question, who is claimed by her father as his unmarried daughter and a minor, it is clearly the proper course to deliver her into the keeping of her father, always providing the father be a proper man to take the charge. No, Le, the judge has simply left the case where he found it. You might have noticed, too, that he referred to my daughter as Odalite Anglesea, otherwise Odalite Force.’”
“I thought he quoted that from the writ.”
“He did, yet his doing so was significant.”
“Oh, Uncle Abel, is there no way out of all this misery? Uncle Abel, it is worse than death! Is there no help for us under the sun?” demanded the youth, with a gesture of despair.
“Yes, Le. Be patient.”