Carlyle into the dressing-room that adjoined my apartment, and there I held an audience with the three who were most interested in my career. Briefly I explained what had occurred, and announced my determination, then and there, to separate forever from the man who could never be more than my nominal husband. I told them I held marriage, next to the Lord's Supper, the holiest sacrament instituted by God, but mine had been an infamous mockery, an unpardonable sin against me, and an insult to Heaven, whose blessing could never rest upon it. Marriage, without sanctifying love, was unhallowed, was a transgression of divine law, and a crime against my womanhood which neither God nor man should forgive. Maurice Carlyle had perjured himself,--had never loved the woman who went with him to the altar,--and the affection that had stirred my heart one hour before, was now as dead as the Pharaohs hidden for centuries under the pyramids. We two, who had sworn to love, honor, and cherish one another, now hated and despised each other beyond all possibility of expression; and I considered it a heinous sin to perpetuate the awful mockery, to cling to the letter of a contract that bade defiance to every impulse of heart and soul,--to every dictate of reason and decree of conscience. Wedded lives and divided hearts I believed a crime, and while I admitted that man could not put asunder those whom God's statutes joined together, I contended that Mr. Carlyle's perjury rendered it sinful for him and me to reside under the same roof. I could not recognize the validity of divorces, for human hands could not unlink God's fetters, and man's law had no power to free either of us from the bonds we had voluntarily assumed in the invoked presence of Jehovah. I would neither accept nor permit a divorce, for, in my estimation, it was not worth the paper that framed it, and was a species of sacrilegious trifling; but I would never live as the wife of a man who had repeatedly declared he had not an atom of affection for me. _Under some circumstances I deemed separation a woman's duty_, and while I fully comprehended the awful import of the vow '_Till death us do part_,' and denied that human legislators could free us, or annul the marriage, I was resolved, while life lasted, to consider myself a duped, an unloved, but a lawful wife,--a woman consecrated by solemn oaths that no human action could cancel. Since money was the bait, I was willing to divide my fortune as the price of a quiet separation; and though from that hour I intended to quit his presence forever, and regard the tie that linked us as merely nominal, I would allow him a liberal income until I attained my majority and would liquidate all his present debts. To your imagination, Dr. Grey, I leave the details of what ensued,--my guardian's remorseful grief, my lawyer's wonder and expostulation, Mr. Carlyle's confusion, chagrin, and rage. He pleaded, argued,