“I was fighting your enemies, myself chief among them. I had determined to save your good name. It was ironical that the friend who tried to help me ruined both your life and mine. Had I known about the child, even though I could not have freed myself by law, I should have declared you my wife before the world--not as I’d have wished, but in a binding pact. Dolores, I have come to tell you----” “So we observe,” slashed His Majesty’s sword-sharp voice. “And might I inquire just why you presume to come to this lady--you who have a perfectly bad wife on Earth?” “I am divorced by death.” John continued to look only at her whose good-faith was the _sine qua non_ of his desire. She, he could see, was eager to hear him, despite her apparent fear of the Machiavellian presence. To her he spoke, low and rapidly. “I found myself in a burning plane at sea. I seemed to hear your voice calling me from far away. But the shortcut I tried to take to you has proved the longest way. When I learned that you had been assigned to Gehenna and I by special license to the Fields, I went mad with rage. That you should be damned and I rewarded for the selfsame crime was unspeakable! They could not drive me back. To be spiritually chained to earth would be bad enough, yet that would have a mortal limit. Even Mors does not seem to know the date of the Second Call. A century on Earth is accounted only an hour here. To wait around in futile transitions from fear to hope--from hope to fear----” “Why didn’t you go on when you had a chance”--again Satan interposed--“on toward that nice place called Paradise?” “Dolores, you are my Paradise--lost and regained, though not yet redeemed. I have come to redeem you.” “_Christ!_” Malice sounded close behind the Satanic sneer. “Just what is your claim, redeemer?” At last John Cabot answered him directly. “I want justice for this woman-soul. I want it _now_. I demand that you release her.” “You _want_? _You_ demand? And you contend that she belongs to the Fields, she compared with whom the ‘mother of harlots’ was a saint in a niche?” “You lie!” At the suppressed fury of John’s declaration, noxious fumes began to spread from the Belial glare. “A strong word to use over a mere disparity in point of view. However, your compliment sounded genuine and I thank you. Sorry that your demand must be denied. Law of the land, you know.” “The best thing about most laws is that they can be broken,” John asserted. “I cannot conceive of a great intellect that would not except this case, once it was explained. A woman who never had an unclean thought or an impulse that was not wholly kind has been sent into Badlands, while each of those who contributed to her fall has been reinstated in the opinion of men. A shop vulture has made a virtue of his vulturing. An alleged man of God----”