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 loved you—she bore your child—she has fought out this moral battle till it is making a wreck of her physically and mentally. There can be but two alternatives left. One is to permit her to go of her own act to a life that, with her sensitive nature and inheritance of the puritan conscience, can never be anything else than prolonged torture. The other is for you to be big enough to go to her and tell her she is free. Tell her you have failed, and to seek her happiness where she thinks it lies."

Every atom of George's combative disposition was roused; every element of his moral nature—or was it his mere male instinct for possession?—rejected as horrible such a cold cutting away of a relation to him that, however unhappy, was sacred and still had in it the element of hope. But he was willing to contemplate the suggestion merely to scorn it.

"And then what?" he demanded with quivering nostrils.

"Women are contrary creatures," asserted the doctor. "Freedom offered by you may be all that is necessary to cause her to change. You may shock her out of her present mood by the very unexpectedness of such an act on your part. Her condition is psychological as well as pathological. The mere fact that you, at obvious pain to yourself, take the big, the noble course, may challenge her admiration and send her flying