“From all that I have heard respecting them I feel that they have in this case expressed what they would consider to be an extraordinarily roseate opinion of our prospects,” said he. “I wonder what move the other side will make next, and I wonder also if his advisers will take a sanguine view of his prospects. Did you gather from anything your father said that the fellow had been with him?” “He said nothing definite on that point; but how should my father know anything of what has happened unless he had seen Marcus Blaydon?” said Priscilla. “He is, as we knew he would be, on the side of Blaydon. Just think of it! He is on the side of the wretch who did his best to wreck my life--who shortened my mother’s life and made its last months to be months of misery instead of happiness--who allowed that false report of his death to go about uncontradicted so that I should run the chance of finding myself in the midst of the trouble that has come to me now--my father takes the side of that man against us, simply because of his superstition as to the sanctity of the marriage service according to the Church of England! He does not consider for a moment that the sacredness of marriage is to be found only in the spirit in which the marriage is entered into. He does not ask himself how there can be any element of a holy ordinance in a fraud.” Jack Wingfield was a man. He had been wise enough to refrain from considering the question of marriage either from the standpoint of a sacrament--the standpoint assumed by the Church of Rome--or from the standpoint of a symbol of the mystical union of Christ and the Church--the standpoint assumed by the Church of England. He had, as a matter of fact, never thought about marriage as a mystery, or the symbol of a mystery. It had only occurred to him that these assumptions, though professed by the Church within the Church, were ignored by the Church outside the Church. The Church of Rome refused to recognize divorce; but had frequently permitted it. It called marriage between an uncle and a niece incest, but sanctified it in the case of a royal personage. The Church of England, with its reiteration about every marriage being indissoluble by man, having been made by God, smiled amiably at the Divorce Court and petted _divorces_. The Church did not attempt to assign a mystic symbolism to divorce; and though it had for years affirmed that the marriage of a man with the sister of his deceased wife was incest, yet Parliament and every sensible person had assured the Church that this view was wrong, and the Church, after a little mumbling, like giants Pope and Pagan at the mouth of their cave, had submitted to be put in the wrong.