I had felt myself an actor in a drama, and now I had very much the feeling an actor would have who answers to a cue and finds himself in mid-stage with the scenery and the rest of the cast suddenly vanished behind him. By that mixture of force and which avails itself of a woman's and cultivated of disputes and raised voices and the betrayal of to strangers, by the sheer tiring down of nerves and of body and by threats of an divorce and a campaign of ruin against me, these three men had obliged Mary to leave Martens and go with them to Southampton, and thence they took her in Justin's yacht, the Water-Witch, to Waterford, and thence by train to a hired house, an adapted old castle at Mirk near Crogham in Mayo. There for all practical purposes she was a prisoner. They took away her purse, and she was four miles from a pillar-box and ten from a telegraph office. This house they had taken furnished without seeing it on the recommendation of a London agent, and in the name of Justin's . presently went Lady Ladislaw, and an announcement appeared in the Times that Justin and Lady Mary had gone abroad for a time and that no letters would be forwarded.  
I have never learnt the particulars of that abduction, but I imagine Mary astonished, her pride , , helpless, and maintaining a certain outward dignity. Moreover, as I was presently to be told, she was ill. Guy and Philip were, I believe, the moving spirits in the affair; Tarvrille was their apologetic , Justin took the responsibility for what they did and bore the cost, he was bitterly ashamed to have these compulsions to his wife, but full now of a fury against myself. He loved Mary still with a love that was shamed and torn and bleeding, but his ruling passion was that stronger passion than love in our poor human hearts, . He was prepared to fight for her now as men fight for a flag, tearing it to pieces in the struggle. He meant now to keep Mary. That settled, he was prepared to consider whether he still loved her or she him....
 
Now here it may seem to you that we are on the very of romance. Here is a beautiful lady carried off and held prisoner in a wild old place, out half cut off from the mainland among the wintry breakers of the west coast of Ireland. Here is the lover, baffled but . Here are the fierce brothers and the stern dragon husband, and you have but to make out that the marriage was , irregular and, on the ground of that irregularity, finally dissoluble, to furnish a theme for Marriott Watson in his most admirable and . You can imagine the happy chances that would have guided me to the hiding-place, the trusty friend who would have come with me and told the story, the grim siege of the place—all as it were sotto voce for fear of scandal—the fight with Guy in the little cave, my attempted , the secret passage. Would to heaven life had those rich , and one could meet one's man at the end of a sword! My siege of Mirk makes a very different story from that.
 
In the first place I had no trusted friend of so a friendship as such aid would demand. I had no one whom it seemed to tell of our relations. I was not one man against three or four men in a romantic struggle for a woman. I was one man against something infinitely greater than that, I was one man against nearly all men, one man against laws, traditions, instincts, institutions, social order. Whatever my position had been before, my continuing pursuit of Mary was open social rebellion. And I was in a state of extreme how far Mary was a willing agent in this . I was disposed to think she had consented far more than she had done to this astonishing step. Carrying off an woman was outside my imaginative range. It was clear in my mind that so far she had never the idea of flight with me, and until she did I was absolutely bound to silence about her. I felt that until I saw her face to face again, and was sure she wanted me to release her, that held. Yet how was I to get at her and hear what she had to say? Clearly it was possible that she was under restraint, but I did not know; I was not certain, I could not prove it. At Guildford station I gathered, after enquiries, that the Justins had booked to London. I had two days of nearly inactivity at home, and then pretended business that took me to London, for fear that I should break out to my father. I came up a dozen impossible projects of action in my mind. I had to get into touch with Mary, at that my mind hung and stopped. All through the twenty-four hours my nerves jumped at every knock upon my door; this might be the letter, this might be the telegram, this might be herself escaped and come to me. The days passed like days upon a painful sick-bed, grey or foggy London days of an length and emptiness. If I sat at home my imagination tortured me; if I went out I wanted to be back and see if any communication had come. I tried repeatedly to see Tarvrille. I had an idea of obtaining a complete for an elopement, but I was restrained by my entire ignorance of what a woman may need. I tried to equip myself for a sudden crisis by the completest preparation of every possible aspect. I did some absurd and ill-advised things. I astonished a respectable solicitor in a grimy little office behind a queer little court with trees near Cornhill, by asking him to give advice to an client and then putting my anonymous case before him. "Suppose," said I, "it was for the plot of a play." He nodded gravely.
 
My case as I stated it struck me as an unattractive one.
 
"Application for a of Habeas Corpus," he considered with eyes that tried to remain , "by a Wife's Lover, who wants to find out where she is.... It's unusual. You will be requiring the husband to produce her Corpus.... I don't think—speaking in the same general terms as those in which you put the circumstances, it would be likely to succeed.... No."
 
Then I overcame a profound and went to a firm of private detectives. It had occurred to me that if I could have Justin, Tarvrille, Guy or Philip traced I might get a clue to Mary's hiding-place. I remember a queer little office, a blusterous, frock-coated creature with a pock-marked face, iron-grey hair, an eyeglass and a strained voice, who told me twice that he was a gentleman and several times that he would prefer not to do business than to do it in an ungentlemanly manner, and who was quite obviously ready and eager to either side in any scandal into which spite or weakness admitted his gesticulating fingers. He to his staff, to his woman helpers, "some personally attached to me," to his underground knowledge of social life—"the side." What could he do for me? There was nothing, I said, illicit about me. His interest a little. I told him that I was interested in certain financial matters, no matter what they were, and that I wanted to have a report of the movements of Justin and his brothers-in-law for the past few weeks and for a little time to come. "You want them watched?" said my private enquiry agent, leaning over the desk towards me and betraying a slight . "Exactly," said I. "I want to know what sort of things they are looking at just at present."
 
"Have you any inkling——?"
 
"None."
 
"If our agents have to travel——"
 
I expressed a reasonable in the matter of expenses, and left him at last with a vague in my mind. How far mightn't this the whole business in the course of his ? And then what could he do? Suppose I went back forthwith and stopped his enquiries before they began! I had a disagreeable feeling of meanness that I couldn't shake off; I felt I was taking up a weapon that Justin didn't deserve. Yet I argued with myself that the abduction of Mary any such course.
 
As I was still debating this I saw Philip. He was perhaps twenty yards ahead of me, he was paying off a hansom which had just put him down outside Blake's. "Philip," I cried, following him up the steps and overtaking him and seizing his arm as the commissionaire opened the door for him. "Philip! What have you people done with Mary? Where is Mary?"
 
He turned a white face to me. "How dare you," he said with a catch of the breath, "mention my sister?"
 
I in an undertone, and stepped a little between him and the man at the door in order that the latter might not hear what I said. "I want to see her," I expostulated. "I must see her. What you are doing is not playing the game. I've got to see her."
 
"Let go of my arm, sir!" cried he, and suddenly I felt a whirlwind of rage answering the rage in his eyes. The pent-up of three weeks rushed to its violent release. He struck me in the face with the hand that was gripped about his umbrella. He meant to strike me in the face and then escape into his club, but before he could get away from me after his blow I had flung out at him, and had hit him under the jawbone. My blow followed his before guard or counter was possible. I hit with all my being. It was an amazi............