"I should like to speak in the presence of my wife," Emmet announced uncompromisingly.
"My daughter will not be present at this interview," the bishop declared, with marked austerity, "nor at any other interview that may subsequently become necessary, though I hope we shall come to such a satisfactory understanding to-day as to make further conferences superfluous. This arrangement is with her entire consent, or rather, is the fulfilment of her expressed wish. I must protest also against your designation of my daughter as your wife. She is not such in the full sense of the term. She has never appeared with you publicly as your wife, but by her desertion of you at the very altar she emphatically showed that she realised her mistake at once and repudiated it."
"Desertion is no cause for divorce, bishop," Emmet returned, with an ugly gleam in his eyes, "either in your Church or in mine. Your daughter's treatment of me has been such that the only amends she can make is to acknowledge our relationship and act accordingly."
"Come, come, Mr. Emmet," the other retorted, "I need scarcely remind you how far my daughter has already atoned for her mistake by helping you to realise your ambition, by suggesting it, in fact, and by lending you books for your instruction. It seems to me that a manly man would acknowledge this frankly, that he would not strive to hold the woman to the letter of the agreement after discovering that the spirit was no longer there to give it life."
"I could have won without her," the mayor declared hoarsely.
The bishop smiled with exasperating, ironical amusement. "We will waive that point, then, Mr. Emmet. It suggests a fruitless discussion, that would merely serve to distract us from the main question. I was about to say, when you interrupted me, that if you always considered your marriage as binding as you now feign to consider it, you should have come to me and announced the fact. By your acquiescence in my daughter's desertion, you tacitly admitted that you released her, that you had nothing to announce. If you did not consider then that the marriage was binding, you cannot begin to do so at this late hour."
"Allow me to say that your daughter considered it binding," Emmet put in shrewdly. "She did not repudiate her mistake, as you call it, by leaving me at the altar. On the contrary, she intended all along to acknowledge our marriage as soon as I should be elected mayor."
"She did not, perhaps, realise the full significance of her instinctive action," the bishop answered. "A woman is a mystery to herself no less than to others. I am putting the case to you as man to man, hoping to kindle a spark of generous understanding in your heart. Could any woman who really loved a man do as she did? I tell you, and you know, that it was the folly of a romantic girl, a folly that does not deserve the penalty you would inflict. If my daughter did not actually, in so many words, repudiate her mistake in the beginning, she did so in a recent interview with you, and she does so finally now by me."
"And she did me a great wrong!" Emmet cried hotly. "If you are a man, bishop, you must know what it meant to be tricked and disappointed as I was."
The bishop's face grew livid, and he shrank within himself.