"ah, thereby hangs a rather painful tale. this fellow is madly, insanely, in love with her, but some two years ago, when he was only a lad, and before he really knew her, for she had been away five years at a boarding-school, what does the idiot do but get into the clutches of a barmaid in bristol and marry her at a registry office? no one knows a word of the matter, but you can imagine how maddening it must be to him to be upbraided for not doing what he would give his very eyes to do, but what he knows to be absolutely impossible. it was sheer frenzy of this sort which made him throw his hands up into the air when his father, at their last interview, was goading him on to propose to miss turner. on the other hand, he had no means of supporting himself, and his father, who was by all accounts a very hard man, would have thrown him over utterly had he known the truth. it was with his barmaid wife that he had spent the last three days in bristol, and his father did not know where he was. mark that point. it is of importance. good has come out of evil, however, for the barmaid, finding from the papers that he is in serious trouble and likely to be hanged, has thrown him over utterly and has written to him to say that she has a husband already in the bermuda dockyard, so that there is really no tie between them. i think that that bit of news has consoled young mccarthy for all that he has suffered."