There was water on a
side-table--he drank a deep draught of it--roused himself--seized
on the newspaper with both hands, as if it had been a living
thing that could feel the desperate resolution of his grasp, and
read the article through, sentence by sentence, word by word.
The subject was the Law of Divorce, and the example quoted was
the example of his wife.
At that time England stood disgracefully alone as the one
civilized country in the world having a divorce law for the
husband which was not also a divorce law for the wife. The writer
in the _Times_ boldly and eloquently exposed this discreditable
anomaly in the administration of justice; hinted delicately at
the unutterable wrongs suffered by Mrs. Duncan; and plainly
showed that she was indebted to the accident of having been
married in Scotland, and to her consequent right of appeal to the
Scotch tribunals, for a full and final release from the tie that
bound her to the vilest of husbands, which the English law of
that day would have mercilessly refused.
He read that. Other men might have gone on to the narrative
extracted from the Scotch newspaper. But at the last word of the
article _he_ stopped.
The newspaper, and the unread details which it contained, lost
all hold on his attention in an instant, and in their stead,
living and burning on his mind, like the Letters of Doom on the
walls of Belshazzar, there rose up in judgment against him the
last words of a verse in the Gospel of Saint Luke--
_"Whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband,
commiteth adultery.
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