Macneillie felt that longer silence was perilous, he had learned to allow himself scant leisure when temptation was rife. “Tell me now what your trouble is,” he said quietly. “Oh!” she cried vehemently, “it seems like sacrilege even to speak of it in such a place as this where all is so peaceful.” Macneillie, who was very far from being at peace, smiled a little involuntarily. “The place is well enough,” he said glancing round. “But now that we are actually among the ‘pendent boughs’ it reminds me rather too much of ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook.’ It might be the identical spot where Ophelia was drowned.” “I wonder if it is,” she said diverted for a minute from her own anxieties. “Poor Ophelia! Somehow I have never cared for acting that part of late years. You spoiled me for all other Hamlets. I have often wondered since, Hugh, how you contrived to get through that last season in London.” “Well it was a rough time,” said Macneillie, “for, like the Danish Prince, ‘In my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep.’ By the end of the season I was as nearly mad as Hamlet feigned to be. But no more of that. It is of the present we must talk not of the past. How can I help you? Has anyone been molesting you?” “Yes,” she faltered. “I will tell you all, and then you will understand.” So in her musical voice, and with that extraordinary charm of manner which made her irresistible, she told him simply and truthfully all the difficulties she had had to contend with. Lastly she told him of Conway Sartoris and of the arguments he had used in his letter. “They seem to me quite unanswerable,” she said, “and he is a man everyone respects, he is far more intellectual than we are, and he doesn’t merely theorise, he knows the difficulties of real life. The more I think of it, the more it seems to me that you and I are wrecking our lives and suffering so cruelly all for a mistaken idea,--a sort of fetish-worship for the law of the land.” Macneillie had grown very pale, his hands trembled, but from long force of habit his voice was well under control. “Sin is lawlessness,” he quoted in a low tone. “Yes, yes,” she said quickly. “But this law that parts us, that makes our lives a hell--you say it is an unjust law and ought to be reformed. You said that in your letter.” “I long for its reform with all my heart,” he replied. “And the greatest of living statesmen and the most devoted of English Churchmen did his utmost in 1857 to prevent this wicked double standard of morality from ever finding a place in the Divorce Law. He said he would deliberately prefer an increase in the number of cases of divorce to the acceptance of this shameful inequality between men and women.”