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224 "I have not given you the right to call me Jennifer," she said.

"But you will." He paused, then said slowly: "If you are too tired we will leave the matter for to-night. But you cannot imagine that I am going to let it rest."

"I am not too tired. No." She shivered a little. "But it can only hurt us."

"I don't fancy your suggested remedy would ease that. Have you found it so simple to put the thing out of your heart?"

"You know that I have not. But that doesn't alter the question. We are not our own masters here. This has been threshed out for us long ago—through suffering—and passion—and bitter remorse."

Her voice was low, and she looked past him to the sky. In her loose white dress and her aureole of bright hair she seemed almost unearthly, guarded from his dominant eagerness by a strange sacredness which daunted and puzzled him.

"I am not asking you to do wrong," he said. "God forbid. But to divorce the man who has ill-treated you and whom you do not love, and to marry the man who loves you is common-sense only. To refuse to do it is the wrong. Can't you see that?"

"I made no reservations when I married Harry. I cannot make them now. I could not live in the same house with him again, I think. But I must be free to help him if ever he should need help. This is my duty. Not my duty to myself only, nor to you, nor to him. We can't get away from the fact that we belong to the great Brotherhood of Life. Where you or I fail or sin future generations pay for it."

"I don't understand. It is not as if you had children" "I didn't mean that. But it has taken such centuries to work out the moral laws, and so we know they must be true. We should hurt ourselves and more than ourselves if we broke them."

"I cannot feel or believe that, Jennifer."

"But I can and do. And because you know this it is for you to help me, not to hinder. It should be the pride