"So that I—that we——" she started.
"So that you and von Klausen may marry."
"But we can't anyhow! Oh—that's the horror of it! That's why the thing can never be mended. In his religion there is no divorce. Marriage is a sacrament. Final. It lasts until one or the other dies."
Stainton frowned. It was a slight frown, rather of annoyance than of pain.
"Yes," he said. "I gave all my earlier life for my superstition, and now——"
"You see," she was running on, "in his faith, a marriage——"
"Yes, yes," he interrupted. "I know. They are flat-footed on that. I am only wondering——"
His speech dropped from the vocabulary of emotion to the trivial phrases of the colloquial.
"Look there!" he broke off.
Her eyes followed his pointing finger: in a little gap through the tree-tops they could see the path below, and up the path a figure was bounding: fevered, lithe, young.