As she stood above them, barred by that tense right arm, noting the tight clasp of the thin hands locked behind the father's head, an impotent rage made her long to scream out the agony that found no vent save in a rapid beating of one foot on the bare floor--much like the lashing tail of some furious furred creature, crouching to spring, yet warily hesitant. Father Temple's outstretched hand caught a fold of her skirt, and with it a strand of floating hair. "Nona, my wife--my own wife----" She twitched her dress from his grasp and shook it. "I am not your wife! Thank God, I am no man's wife! I am free as I was before you came--an ever-lasting blot between me and the sunshine. I kept my promise to you. I set my teeth and was silent under a fiery storm of slander and foul accusations that blistered my girlish cheek with shame, but I waited till the years you named had passed, and you had reached your majority, and plucked up courage to face your father, and had a legal right to ratify what the Church sanctioned through the chaplain. Then I told my only friend all the facts. I ceased to hope, because I had lost faith, but Mr. Dane pleaded for you: 'Wait one year more, give him the last chance to do right.' He wrote to a friend in the old regiment and inquired about all the officers, and his answer told us that your father was in Europe, and that the major thought you were with him. Then I laid my case before one of the human vultures that batten on the wreckage of broken vows--a lawyer, expert in snapping matrimonial chains. He sent you all the necessary notices--sent them to your college address, the only one I could give him. Very soon the decree of absolute divorce was rendered, and I dropped all right to a name I had never publicly claimed--cast it off as gladly as I would some foul garment worn by a leper. Free--free to live my life as I pleased; Mrs. Dane and her boy Leighton--free to go wherever I wished, after death took the only real protector I ever had. And I chose, for my baby's sake as well as my own, to lead the hard life of a working woman, but clean, and honorable, and innocent as that of any abbess safely stored away from temptation behind brick walls and iron gates, and though my own little one may well be ashamed of his father, he will never need to blush for his mother when the peace of death hides her from an unjust and a cruel world." Sunshine had vanished, the room was darkening, and the last glow from a topaz band low in the west flickered over the woman's head, as she swayed in the wave of passionate protest that rocked her from all trammels of control. There was a brief silence, broken by a strangling sob and cough, and over the breast of the priest's cassock a warm red stream trickled. He rose quickly with the boy in his arms and carried him to the window. "Nona, a hemorrhage!"