"I do think of her—oh, I do think! But it makes me mad."
"Go back to her and forget me then, if it must be so. Remember this, Scroop—that the bond that holds you to her is thrice as strong as it would be if...."
"If what?"
"Well!—I must say it. If it were a legal one...."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean you are not married to her—there!"
"Oh, the Deceased Wife's Sister rubbish?"
"Yes." And then Challis thought to himself, through the fog of all his soul-torture and perplexity, "How comes she to be so ready to go home to the mark? We have never talked beyond the bare fact that Marianne and Kate were sisters." But he let the thought go by, to make way for another of greater weight with him.
"You never can mean," he cried—"you—you—you never can mean that I——" She interrupted him with the self-command that seemed to belong to her—to grow upon her, if anything—and completed his speech for him: "That you would take advantage of a legal shuffle to evade a promise given in honour? Of course, I mean the exact reverse. I mean that you, of all men, would hold yourself three times bound to an illegal contract."
"All men would, worth the name of men. Debts Law disallows are debts of honour. But all that is nothing. I love my wife. I tell you I love my wife; I will not have it otherwise." His voice was almost angry, as against some counter-speech. But he dropped it in a kind of exhaustion, with a subdued half-moan. "What have I to do," said he wearily, "with all these wretched nostrums of legislation and religion, that would dictate the terms of Love? Mine have come to me, and my soul is wrenched asunder. Surely the penalty is enough to make beadledom superfluous. No man who knows what Love means will ever love two women.... There—that's enough!" He stopped abruptly, as cutting something needless short. She spoke: