“Mildred, is it irrevocable? Can you sacrifice me for a scruple?”
“It is more than a scruple: it is the certainty that there is but one right course, and that I must hold by it to the end.”
“That certainty does not come out of your own heart or your own mind. It is Cancellor who has made this law for you—Cancellor, a fanatic, who knows nothing of domestic love—Cancellor, a man without a wife and without a home. Is he to judge between you and me? Is he, who knows nothing of the sacredness of wedded ties, to be allowed to break them, only because he wears a cassock and has an eloquent tongue?”
“It was he who taught me my duty when I was a child. I accept his teaching now as implicitly as I accepted it then.”
“And you do not mind breaking my heart: that does not hurt you,” said Greswold.
His face was pallid as hers, and his lips trembled, half in anger, half in scorn.
“O, George, you know my own heart is breaking. There can be no greater pain possible to humanity than I have suffered since I left you.”
“And you will inflict this agony, and bear this agony? You will break two hearts because of an anomaly in the marriage law—a rag of Rome—a source of profit to Pope and priest—a prohibition made to be annulled—a trap to fill the coffers of the Church! Do you know how foolish a law it is, child, for which you show this blind reverence? Do you know that it is only a bigoted minority among the nations that still abides by it? Do you know that in that great new world across the seas a woman may be a wife in one colony, and not a wife in another—honourable here, despised there? It is all too foolish. What is it to either of us if my first wife was your half-sister—a fact which neither of us can prove or disprove?”
“God help me! it is proved only too clearly to me. We bear the mark of our birthright in our faces. You must have seen that, George, long before I saw Fay’s portrait in your hands. Are we not alike?”
“Not with the likeness of sisters. There is a look which might be a family likeness—a look which puzzled me like the faint memory of a dream when first I knew you. It was long before I discovered what the likeness was, and where it lay. At most it was but a line here and there. The arch of the brow, the form of the eyelid, an expression about the mouth when you smile. Such accidental resemblances are common enough. She was as much like César Castellani as she is like you. I have seen a look in his face that curiously recalls an expression of hers.”