“Cis, listen to me!” Rodney began, dropping on his knees beside Cicely, compelling her horror-stricken eyes to meet his eyes. “That girl was not fit to be any man’s wife. Do you understand? My marriage was a mockery from the first, and soon I hated her as much as I had been fascinated by her. From sly, hidden beginnings, she soon passed into open evil. She disgraced me while I was her husband, and since I have been free of her she has gone into utter degradation. There was not an instant’s question of my getting rid of her; court and common humanity would grant me my decree of divorce. Are you going to tell me that I have a living wife? I have no wife. Would you make all my life desolate because she was what she was? Only the Catholic Church forbids marriage under my conditions. Do you see now why I want you to shake off her laws, which do violence to every natural instinct of justice? Am I to suffer, live alone, denied wife and children? _I_ suffer, who was not the offender? Is that sense? Plain common sense forbids such foolishness. Throw off your prejudices; come out into freedom and happiness, my darling! Only your ridiculous Roman Catholic tyrants forbid it; God is on our side, not they! The reverend mayor, or a reverend alderman can marry us as tight and as sacredly as that thin Jesuit can whom we met coming back from Pioneer Falls that Sunday. You’re not actually a Catholic. Cis, I’ve suffered enough. Make it up to me! With you my wife there won’t be a scar left of these wicked wounds! Cis, don’t you love me? Stop staring at me so, as if you’d never seen me before! Cis, don’t you know I’m Rory O’Moore, unchanged? That this is our home, and you my Holly-bride?” Cis did not move. She stared at Rodney stonily, trying to force her mind to grasp this thing that had fallen upon her when her happiness was at its height, made sweeter and holier than before by her new sense of the meaning of home-making. “Was this woman--your wife--was she a Catholic?” Cis managed to ask. “Well, I’ve no love for the Catholic Church, but I wouldn’t wish her on any Church,” Rodney laughed bitterly. “Religion wasn’t in her line, but her people were Catholic; she’d had baptism.” “You knew that, because you were married by a priest,” Cicely groped in her mind for what she wanted to say. “They ask--about baptism. You were married by a priest?” “Yes. But, good heavens, Cis--” Rodney cried out. “What of that? These things have no power over us unless we give them the right to it. Priest or no priest, the laws of our country freed me; isn’t that enough?” “You have a living wife.” Cis repeated the words, changing her formula, but clinging to the sole idea that took shape in her stunned brain.