Ramsey town, Ramsey town, smiling by the sea,
Here's a health to my true love, wheresoe'er she be.
When the steamer had passed into darkness, Martin said:
"I don't want to hurt you again, Mary, but before I go there's something I want to know. . . . If you cannot divorce your husband, and if . . . if you cannot come to me what . . . what is left to us?"
I tried to tell him there was only one thing left to us, and (as much for myself as for him) I did my best to picture the spiritual heights and beauties of renunciation.
"Does that mean that we are to . . . to part?" he said. "You going your way and I going mine . . . never to meet again?"
That cut me to the quick, so I said—it was all I could trust myself to say—that the utmost that was expected of us was that we should govern our affections—control and conquer them.
"Do you mean that we are to stamp them out altogether?" he said.
That cut me to the quick too, and I felt like a torn bird that is struggling in the lime, but I contrived to say that if our love was guilty love it was our duty to destroy it.
"Is that possible?" he said.
"We must ask God to help us," I answered, and then, while his head was down and I was looking out into the darkness, I tried to say that though he was suffering now he would soon get over this disappointment.