"But how?" he persisted. "Your life will be the same as now, and your position not so assured. The alimony allowed by law won't any thing like cover your present expenditures, and you can hardly expect me to be more generous than the law compels. The divorce can make little difference, save to diminish your income and deprive you of the protection of my name. You will not care to marry again, and the divorce will be a restricted one." Thorne was forcing his adversary's hand. "Why will it be restricted?" she demanded, her color and her temper rising. "It shall _not_ be restricted, or hampered in any way, I tell you, Nesbit Thorne! Am I to be fettered, and bound, and trammeled by you forever? I will _not_ be. The divorce shall give me unlimited power to do what I please with my life. It shall make me as free as air--as free as I was before I married you." "You would not wish to marry again?" he repeated. "Why not?" rising to her feet and confronting him in angry excitement. "Because, in that case, you would lose your child. I neither could nor would permit my son to be brought up in the house of a man who stood to him in the relationship you propose." "You cannot take him from me," Mrs. Thorne retorted in defiant contradiction; her ideas of the power of men and lawyers hopelessly vague and bewildered. "No court on earth would take so small a child from his mother." "Ah! you propose having the case come into court then? I misunderstood you. I thought you wished the affair managed quietly, to avoid publicity and comment. Of course, if the case comes into court, I shall contest it, and try to obtain possession of the boy, even for the time the law allows the mother, on the ground of being better able to support and educate him." "I do not want the case to come into court here, Nesbit, and you know that I do not! Why do you delight in tormenting me?"