A village on the coast of Maine; in this village a boarding-house; in this boarding-house a parlor.

This parlor is, strictly speaking, a chamber:it is in the second story, and until lately it contained a bed, washstand, etc.; but a visitor from New York has taken a fancy to change it to a reception-room.In the rear, communicating with it, is a sleeping-closet.

The room is what you might expect to find in a village boarding-house:the floor of liliuptian extent; the ceiling low, uneven, cracked and yellow; the originally coarse and ugly wall-paper now blotched with age; the carpet thin, threadbare, patched and stained; the furniture of various woods and colors, and in various stages of decrepitude.

But a tiny bracket or two, three or four handsome engravings, two fresh wreaths of evergreens, two vases of garden flowers, a number of Swiss and French knickknacks, and a few prettily-bound books, give the little nest an air of refinement which is almost elegance.

You judge at once that the occupant must be a woman a woman moreover of sensibility and taste; a woman of good society.Of all this you become positive when you look at her, take note of her gracious manner and listen to her cultured voice.

Her expression is singularly frank and almost childlike:it exhibits a rapid play of thoughts, and even of emotions:it is both vivacious and refined, both eager and sweet.  It would seem as if here were the impossible combination, the ideal union, so often dreamed of by poets and artists, of girlish simplicity and innocence with womanly cleverness and feeling.

In a large easy-chair reclines her rather small, slender and willowy form, starting slightly forward when she speaks, and sinking back when she listens.Her sparkling eyes are fixed on the eyes of her one visitor with an intentness and animation of interest which should be very fascinating.

He, a young man, not five years older than herself, very gentle in manner and with a remarkably sweet expression of face, evidently is fascinated, and even strongly moved, if one may judge by the feverish color in his cheeks, the eager inquiry of his gaze and the tremor of his lips.

The first words of hers which we shall record are a strange utterance to come from a woman: 

“Let me tell you something which I have read lately.It sounds like a satire, and yet there is too much truth in it:’Every woman in these days needs two husbands one to fill her purse, and one to fill her heart; one to dress her, and one to love her.It is not easy to be the two in one.’That is what I have read, and it is only too true.Remember it, and don’t marry.”

A spasm of intense spiritual pain crossed the young man’s fine and kindly face.

“Don’t say such things, I beg of you!” he implored.“I am sure that in what you have quoted there is a slander upon most women.I know that it slanders you.”

Her lips parted as if for a contradiction, but it was evidently very pleasant to her to hear such words from him, and with a little childlike smile of gratification she let him proceed.

“I have perfect confidence in you,” he murmured.“I am willing to put all my chances of happiness in your hands.  My only fear is that I am not half worthy of you not a thousandth part worthy of you.Will you not listen to me seriously?Will you not be so kind?”

A tremor of emotion slightly lifted her hands, and it seemed for a moment as if she would extend them to him.Then there was a sudden revulsion:  with a more violent shudder, evidently of a painful nature, she threw herself backward, her face turned pale, and she closed her eyes as if to shut him from her sight.

“I ought to ask your pardon,” she whispered.“I never thought that it would come to this.I never meant that it should.  Oh, I ask your pardon.”Recovering herself with singular quickness, a bright smile dancing along the constantly changing curves of her lips, like sunbeams leaping from wavelet to wavelet, she once more leaned cordially toward him, and said in a gay yet pleading tone, “Let us talk of something else.Come, tell me about yourself all about yourself, nothing about me.”

“I cannot speak of anything else,” he replied, after looking at her long in silence.“My whole being is full of you:  I cannot think of anything else.”

A smile of gratitude sweetly mastered her mouth:then it suddenly turned to a smile of pity; then it died in a quiver of remorse.

“Oh, we cannot marry,” she sighed.“We must not marry, if we could.  Let me tell you something dreadful.People hate each other after they are married.I know:  I have seen it.I knew a girl of seventeen who married a man ten years older a man who was Reason itself.Her friends told her, and she herself believed it, that she was sure of happiness.  But after three years she found that she did not love, that she was not loved, and that she was miserable.  He was too rational:he used to judge her as he would a column of figures he had no comprehension for her feelings.”

There was a momentary pause, during which she folded her hands and looked at him, but with an air of not seeing him.In the recollection of this heart-tragedy of the past and of another she had apparently forgotten the one which was now pressing upon herself.

“It was incredible how cold and unsympathizing and dull he could be,” she went on.“Once, after she had worked a week in secret to surprise him with a dressing-gown made by her own hands labored a week, waited and hoped a week for one word of praise he only said, ‘It is too short.’Don’t you think it was cruel?It was.I suppose he soon forgot it, but she never could.A woman cannot forget such slights:they do not seem little blows to her; they make her very soul bleed.”

“Don’t reproach me for it,” whispered the young man with a pleading smile.“You seem to be reproving me, and I can’t bear it.I am not guilty.”

“Oh, not you,” she answered quickly.“I am not scolding you.I could not.”

She did not mean it, but she gave him a smile of indescribable sweetness:she had had no intention of putting out her hands toward him, but she did it.He seized the delicate fingers and slowly drew her against his heart.Her face crimson with feeling, her whole form trembling to the tiniest vein, she rose to her feet, turning away her head as if to fly, and yet did not escape, and could not wish to escape.Holding her in his arm, he poured into her ear a murmur which was not words, it was so much more than words.

“Oh, could you truly love me?” she at last sobbed.“Could you keep loving me?”

After a while some painful recollection seemed to awaken her from this dream of happiness, and, drawing herself out of his embrace, she looked him sadly in the eyes, saying, “I must not be so weak.I must save myself and you from misery.  Oh, I must.Go now leave me for a while:  do go.I must have time to think before I say another word to you.”

“Good-bye, my love soon to be my wife,” he answered, stifling with a kiss the “No, no,” which she tried to utter.

Although he meant to go, and although she was wretchedly anxious that he should go, he was far from gone.All across the room, at every square of the threadbare carpet, they halted to renew their talk.Minutes passed, an hour had flown, and still he was there.And when he at last softly opened the door, she herself closed it, saying, “Oh no! not yet.”

So greedy is a loving woman for love, so much does she hate to lose the breath of it from her soul:to let it be withdrawn is like consenting to die when life is sweetest.

Thus it was through her, who had bidden him to go, and who had meant that he should go, that he remained for minutes longer, dropping into her ear whispers of love which at last drew out her confession of love.And when the parting moment came that moment of woman’s life in which she least belongs to herself there was not in this woman a single reservation of feeling or purpose.

These people, who were so madly in love with each other, were almost strangers.  The man was Charles Leighton, a native of Northport, who had never gone farther from his home than to Boston, and there only to graduate in the Harvard College and Medical School.

The lady was Alice Duvernois:  her name was all that was known of her in the village it was all that she had told of herself.Only a month previous to the scene above described she had arrived in Northport to obtain, as she said, a summer of quiet and sea-bathing.She had come alone, engaged her own rooms, and for a time seemed to want nothing but solitude.

Even after she had made herself somewhat familiar with the other inmates of the boarding-house, nothing positive was learned of her history.That she had been married was probable:an indefinable something in her face and carriage seemed to reveal thus much:moreover, her trunks were marked “James Duvernois.”

And yet, so young did she sometimes look, so childlike was her smile and so simple her manner, that there were curious ones who scouted the supposition of wifehood.People addressed her both as “Miss” and “Mrs.”; at last it was discovered that her letters bore the latter title:then she became popularly known as “the beautiful widow.”

It would be a waste of time to sketch the opening and ripening of the intimacy between Doctor Leighton and this fascinating stranger.On his part it was as nearly a case of love at first sight as perhaps can occur among people of the Anglo-Saxon race.From the beginning he had no doubts about giving her his whole heart:he was mastered at once by an emotion which would not let him hesitate:  he longed with all his soul for her soul, and he strove to win it.

Well, we will not go over the story:  we know that he had triumphed.Yes, in spite of her terror of the future, in spite of some withholding mystery in the past, she had granted him or rather she had not been able to prevent him from seizing her passionate affection.She had uttered a promise which, a month before, she would not have dreamed herself capable of making.

In so doing she had acquired an almost unendurable happiness.It was one of those mighty and terrible joys which are like the effect of opium one of those joys which condense life and abbreviate it, which excite and yet stupefy, which intoxicate and kill.With this in her heart she lived ten of her old days in one, but also she drew for those ten days upon her future.

After one of her interviews with Leighton, after an hour of throbbing, of trembling, of vivid but confused emotions, her face would be as pale as death, and her weakness such that she could hardly speak.The hands which, while they clung to his, had been soft and moist, became dry and hot as with fever, and then cold as ice.At night she could scarcely sleep:for hours her brain throbbed with the thought of him, and of what stood between him and her.In the morning she was heavy with headache, dizzy, faint, hysterical; yet the moment she saw him again she was all life, all freshness.

From the point of confession there was no more resistance.She would be his wife; she would be married whenever he wished; she seemed mad to reward him for his love; she wanted somehow to sacrifice herself for his sake.Yet, although she hesitated no longer, she sometimes gazed at him with eyes full of anxiety, and uttered words which presaged evil.

“If any trouble springs from this, you must pardon me,” she more than once whispered.“I cannot help it.I have never, never, never been loved before; and oh, I have been so hungry, so famished for it, I had begun to despair of it.Yes, when I first met you, I had quite despaired of there being any love in the world for me.I could not help listening to you:  I could not help taking all your words and looks into my craving heart; and now I am yours forgive me!”

Stranger as she was in Northport, everybody trusted the frank sweetness in her face, and sought no other cause for admiring her and wishing her happiness.The whole village came to the church to witness her marriage and to doat upon a bridal beauty which lay far more in expression than in form or feature.A few words of description inadequate notes to represent the precious gold of reality must be given to one who could change the stare of curiosity to a beaming glance of sympathy.

Small, slender, fragile; neither blonde nor brunette; a clear skin, with a hectic flush; light chestnut hair, glossy and curling; eyes of violet blue, large, humid and lustrous, which at the first glance seemed black because of the darkness, length and closeness of the lashes, and capable of expressing an earnestness and sweetness which no writer or artist might hope to depict; a manner which in solitude might be languid, but which the slightest touch of interest kindled into animation; in fine, white teeth that sparkled with gayety, and glances that flashed happiness.

She was married without bridal costume, and there was no wedding journey.Leighton was poor, and must attend to his business; and his wife wanted nothing from him which he could not spare nothing but his love.Impossible to paint her pathetic gratitude for this affection; the spiritual it was not passionate fondness which she bore him; the softness of her eyes as she gazed for minutes together into his; the sudden, tremulous outreachings of her hands toward him, as she just touches him with her finger and draws back, then leans forward and lies in his arms, uttering a little cry of happiness.  Here was a heart that must long have hungered for affection a heart unspeakably thankful and joyous at obtaining it.

“I have been smiling all day,” she sometimes said to him.“People have asked me why I looked so gay, and what I had heard that was funny.It is just because I am entirely happy, and because the feeling is still a surprise.  Shall I ever get over it?Am I silly?No!”

Her gladness of heart seemed to make her angelic.She rejoiced in every joy around her, and grieved for every sorrow.She visited the poor of her husband’s patients, watched with them when there was need, made little collections for their relief, chatted away their forebodings, half cured them with her smile.There was something catching, comforting, uplifting in the spectacle of that overbrimming content.

The well were as susceptible to its influence as the sick.Once, half a dozen men and twice as many boys were seen engaged in recovering her veil out of a pond into which the wind had blown it; and when it was handed to her by a shy youth on the end of a twenty-foot pole, all felt repaid for their labors by the childlike burst of laughter with which she received it.Now and then, however, shadows fell across this sunshine.In those dark moments she frequently reverted to the unhappy couple of whom she had told Leighton when he first spoke to her of marriage.She was possessed to describe the man his dull, filmy, unsympathetic black eyes, his methodical life and hard rationality, his want of sentiment and tenderness.

“Why do you talk of that person so much?” Leighton implored.“You seem to be charging me with his cruelty.I am not like him.”

The tears filled her eyes as she started toward him, saying, “No, you are not like him.Even if you should become like him, I couldn’t reproach you.I should merely die.”

“But you know him so well?” he added, inquiringly.“You seem to fear him.Has he any power over you?”

For a moment she was so sombre that he half feared lest her mind was unstrung on this one subject.

“No,” she at last said.  “His power is gone nearly gone.  Oh, if I could only forget!”

After another pause, during which she seemed to be nerving herself to a confession, she threw herself into her husband’s arms and whispered, “He is my uncle.”

He was puzzled by the contrast between the violence of her emotion and the unimportance of this avowal; but as he at least saw that the subject was painful to her, and as he was all confidence and gentleness, he put no more inquiries.

“Forget it all,” he murmured, caressing her; and with a deep sigh, the sigh of tired childhood, she answered, “Yes.”

The long summer days, laden with happiness for these two, sailed onward to their sunset havens.  After a time, as August drew near its perfumed death, Alice began to speak of a journey which she should soon be obliged to make to New York.She must go, she said to Leighton it was a matter of property, of business:she would tell him all about it some day.But she would return soon; that is, she would return as soon as possible:  she would let him know how soon by letter.

When he proposed to accompany her she would not hear of it.To merely go on with her, she represented, would be a useless expense, and to stay as long as she might need to stay would injure his practice.In these days her gayety seemed forced, and more than once he found her weeping; yet so innocent was he, so simple in his views of life, so candid in soul, that he suspected no hidden evil:  he attributed her agitation entirely to grief at the prospect of separation.

His own annoyance in view of the journey centred in the fact that his wife would be absent from him, and that he could not incessantly surround her with his care.Whether she would be happy, whether she would be treated with consideration, whether she would be safe from accidents and alarms, whether her delicate health would not suffer, were the questions which troubled him.He had the masculine instinct of protection:he was as virile as he was gentle and affectionate.

The parting was more painful to him than he had expected, because to her it was such an undisguised and terrible agony.

“You will not forget me?” she pleaded.“You will never, never hate me?You will always love me?You are the only person who has ever made the world pleasant to me; and you have made it so pleasant! so different from what it was! a new earth to me! a star!  I will come back as soon as this business will let me.Some day I will come back, never to go away.  Oh, will not that be delightful?”

Her extreme distress, her terror lest she might not return, her forebodings lest he should some day cease to love her, impressed him for a moment only for a truant moment with doubts as to a mystery.As he left the railway station, full of gratitude for the last glance of her loving eyes, he asked himself once or twice, “What is it?”

What was it?

We will follow her.She is ominously sad during the lonely journey:she is almost stern by the time she arrives in New York.In place of the summer’s sweetness and gayety, there is a wintry and almost icy expression in her face, as if she were about to encounter trials to which she had been long accustomed, and which she had learned to bear with hardness if not with resentment.

No one meets her at the railway station, no one at the door of the sombre house where her carriage stops no one until she has passed up stairs into a darkling parlor.

There she is received by the man whom she has so often described to Deighton a man of thin, erect form, a high and narrow forehead, regular and imperturbable features, fixed and filmy black eyes, a mechanical carriage, an icy demeanor.

At sight of her he slightly bowed then he advanced slowly to her and took her hand:  he seemed to be hesitating whether he should give her any further welcome.

“You need not kiss me,” she said, her eyes fixed on the floor.“You do not wish to do it.”

He sighed, as if he too were unhappy, or at least weary; but he drew his hand away and resumed his walk up and down the room.

“So you chose to pass your summer in a village?” he presently said, in the tone of a man who has ceased to rule, but not ceased to criticise.“I hope you liked it.”

“I told you in my letters that I liked it,” she replied in an expressionless monotone.

“And I told you in my letters that I did not like it.It would have been more decent in you to stay in Portland, among the people whom I had requested to take care of you.However, you are accustomed to have your own way.I can only observe that when a woman will have her own way, she ought to pay her own way.”

A flush, perhaps of shame, perhaps of irritation, crossed her hitherto pale face, but she made no response to the scoff, and continued to look at the floor.

After a few seconds, during which neither of them broke the silence, she seemed to understand that the reproof was over, and she quietly quitted the room.

The man pushed the door to violently with his foot, and said in an accent of angry scorn, “That is what is now called a wife.”

Well, we have reached the mystery:  we have found that it was a crime.

In the working of social laws there occur countless cases of individual hardship.  The institution of marriage is as beneficent as the element of fire; yet, like that, it sometimes tortures when it should only have comforted.

The sufferer, if a woman, usually bears her smart tamely with more or less domestic fretting and private weeping indeed, but without violent effort to escape from her bed of embers.  Divorce is public, ugly and brutal:her sensibility revolts from it.Moreover, mere unhappiness, mere disappointment of the affections, does not establish a claim for legal separation.Finally, there is woman’s difficulty of self-maintenance the fact that her labor will not in general give her both comfort and position.

What then?Unloved, unable to love, yet with an intense desire for affection, and an immense capacity for granting it, her heart is tempted to wander beyond the circle of her duty.A flattering shape approaches her dungeon-walls; a voice calls to her to come forth and be glad, if only for a moment; there seems to be a chance of winning the adoration which has been her whole life’s desire; there is an opportunity of using the emotions which are burning within her.Shall she burst open the gate on which is written LEGALITY?

Evidently the temptation is mighty.  Laden with a forsaken, wounded and perhaps angry heart, she is so easily led into the belief that her exceptional suffering gives her a right to exceptional action!  She feels herself justified in setting aside law, when law, falsifying its purpose, violating its solemn pledge, brings her misery instead of happiness.  She will not, or cannot, reflect that special hardships must occur under all law; that it is the duty of the individual to bear such chance griefs without insurrection against the public conscience; that entire freedom of private judgment would dissolve society.

Too often though far less often than man does the like she makes of her sorrow an armor of excuse, and enters into a contest for unwarrantable chances of felicity.Only, in general, she is so far conscious of guilt, or at least so far fearful of punishment, as to carry on her struggle in the darkness.Few, however maddened by suffering, openly defy the serried phalanx of the world.Still fewer venture the additional risk of defying it under the forms of a legality which they have ventured to violate.

Why is it that so few women, even of a low and reckless class, have been bigamists?  It is because the feminine soul has a profound respect, a little less than religious veneration, for the institution of marriage; because it instinctively recoils from trampling upon the form which consecrates love; because in very truth it regards the nuptial bond as a sacrament.  I believe that the average woman would turn away from bigamy with a deeper shudder than from any other stain of conjugal infidelity.

But there are exceptions to all modes of feeling and of reasoning.

Here is Alice Duvernois:she is a woman of good position, of intellectual quickness, of unusual sensitiveness of spirit; yet she has thought out this woeful question differently from the great majority of her sex.To her, thirsty for sympathy and love, bound to a man who gives her neither, grown feverish and delirious with the torment of an empty heart, it has seemed that the sanctity of a second marriage will somehow cover the violation of a first.

This aberration we can only explain on the ground that she was one of those natures mature in some respects, but strangely childlike in others whom most of us love to stigmatize as unpractical, and who in fact never become quite accustomed to this world and its rules.

On the very evening of her arrival home she put to her husband a question of infantile and almost incredible simplicity.It was one of the many observations which made him tell her from time to time that she was a fool.

“What do they do,” she asked, “to women who marry two husbands?”

“They put them in jail,” was his cool reply.

“I think it is brutal,” she broke out indignantly, as if the iron gates were already closing upon her, and she were contesting the justice of the punishment.

“You are a pretty simpleton, to set up your opinion against that of all civilized society!” was the response of incarnate Reason.

From that moment she trembled at her danger, and quivered under the remorse which terror brings.At times she thought of flying, of abandoning the husband who did not love her for the one who did; but she was afraid of being pursued, afraid of discovery.  The knowledge that society had already passed judgment upon her made her see herself in the new light of a criminal, friendless, hunted and doomed.The penalty of her illegal grasp after happiness was already tracking her like a bloodhound.

Yet when she further learned that her second marriage was not binding because of the first, her heart rose in mutiny.Faithful to the only love that there had been for her in the world, she repeated to herself, a hundred times a day, “It is binding it is!”

She was in dark insurrection against her kind; at times she was on the point of bursting out into open defiance.She stared at Duvernois, crazy to tell him, “I am wedded to another.”

He noticed the wild expression, the longing, wide-open eyes, the parted and eager lips, the trembling chin.At last he said, with a brutality which had become customary with him, “What are you putting on those airs for?I suppose you are imagining yourself the heroine of a romance.”

With a glare of pain and scorn she walked away from him in silence.

It is shocking indeed to be fastened speechless upon a rack, and to be charged by uncomprehending souls with counterfeiting emotion.She was so constituted that she could not help laying up this speech of her husband’s against him as one of many stolid misdoings which justified both contempt and aversion.In fact, his inability or unwillingness to comprehend her had always been, in her searching and sensitive eyes, his chief crime.To be understood, to be accepted at her full worth, was one of the most urgent demands of her nature.

The life of this young woman, not only within but without, was strange indeed.  She fulfilled that problem of Hawthorne’s an individual bearing one character, living one life in one place, and a totally different one in another place upon one spot of earth angelic, and upon another vile.

Stranger still, her harsher qualities appeared where her manner of life was lawful, and her finer ones where it was condemnable.At Northport she had been like sunlight to her intimates and like a ministering seraph to the poor.In New York she avoided society:she had no tenderness for misery.

The explanation seems to be that love was her only motive of feeling and action.Not a creature of reason, not a creature of conscience she was only a creature of emotion, an exaggerated woman.

Unfortunately, her husband, methodical in life, judicial in mind, contemptuous of sentiment, was an exaggerated man.Here was a beating heart united to a skeleton.The result of this unfortunate combination had been a wreck of happiness and defiance of law.

Duvernois had not a friend intelligent enough to say to him, “You must love your wife; if you cannot love her, you must with merciful deception make her believe that you do.You must show her when you return from business that you have thought of her; you must buy a bouquet, a toy, a trifle, to carry home to her.If you do these things, you will be rewarded; if not, you will be punished.”

But had there been such a friend, Duvernois would not have comprehended him.Ho would have replied, or at least he would have thought, “My wife is a fool.She is not worth the money that I now spend upon her, much less the reflection and time that you call upon me to spend.”

Two such as Alice and Duvernois could not live together in peace.Notwithstanding her old dread of him, and notwithstanding the new alarm with which she was filled by the discovery that she was a felon, she could not dissemble her feelings when she looked him in the face.Sometimes she was silently contemptuous sometimes (when her nerves were shaken) openly hostile.Rational, impassive, vigorous as he was, she made him unhappy.

The letters of Leighton were at once a joy and a sorrow.She awaited them impatiently; she went every day to the delivery post-office whither she had directed them to be sent; she took them from the hands of the indifferent clerk with a suffocating beating of the heart.Alone, she devoured them, kissed them passionately a hundred times, sat down in loving haste to answer them.But then came the necessity of excusing her long absence, of inventing some lie for the man she worshiped, of deterring him from coming to see her.

During that woeful winter of terror, of aversion, of vain longing, her health failed rapidly.  A relentless cough pursued her, the beautiful flame in her cheek burned freely, and a burst of blood from the lungs warned her that her future was not to be counted by years.

She cared little:her sole desire was to last until summer.She merely asked to end her hopeless life in loving arms to end it before those arms should recoil from her in horror.

No discovery.Her husband was too indifferent toward her to watch her closely, or even to suspect her.As early in June as might be she obtained permission to go to the seaside, and with an eagerness which would have found the hurricane slow she flew to Northport.

Leighton received her with a joy which at first blinded him to her enfeebled health.

“Oh, how could you stay so long away from me?” were his first words.“Oh, my love, my darling wife! thank you for coming back to me.”

But after a few moments, when the first flush and, sparkle of excitement had died out of her cheeks and eyes, he asked eagerly, “What is the matter with you?Have you been sick?”

“I am all well again, now that I see you,” she answered, putting out her arms to him with that little start of love and joy which had so often charmed him.

It absolutely seemed that in the presence of the object of her affection this erring woman became innocent.Her smile was as simple and pure as that of childhood:her violet eyes reminded one of a heaven without a cloud.It must have been that, away from punishment and from terror, she did not feel herself to be guilty.

But the day of reckoning was approaching.  She had scarcely begun to regain an appearance of health under the stimulus of country air and renewed happiness, when a disquieting letter arrived from Duvernois.  In a tone which was more than usually authoritative, he directed her to meet him at Portland, to go to Nahant and Newport.Did he suspect something?

She would have given years of life to be able to show the letter to Leighton and ask his counsel.But here her punishment began to double upon her:the being whom she most loved was precisely the one to whom she must not expose this trouble the one from whom she was most anxious to conceal it.

In secret, and with unconfided tears, she wrote a reply, alleging (what was true) that her feeble health demanded quiet, and praying that she might be spared the proposed journey.For three days she feverishly expected an answer, knowing the while that she ought to go to Portland to meet Duvernois, should he chance to come, yet unable to tear herself away from Leighton, even for twenty-four hours.

In the afternoon of the third day she made one of her frequent visits of charity.  At the house of a poor and bed-ridden widow she met, as she had hoped to meet, her husband.When they left the place he took her into his gig and carried her home.

It was a delicious day of mid June:  the sun was setting in clouds of crimson and gold; the earth was in its freshest summer glory.In the beauty of the scene, and in the companionship of the heart which was all hers, she forgot, or seemed to forget, her troubles.One hand rested on Leighton’s arm; her face was lifted steadily to his, like a flower to the light; her violet eyes were dewy and sparkling with happiness.There were little clutches of her fingers on his wrist whenever he turned to look at her.There were spasms of joy in her slender and somewhat wasted frame as she leaned from time to time against his shoulder.

Arrived at the house, she was loth to have him leave her for even the time required to take his horse to the stable.

“Come soon,” she said “come as quick as you can.I shall be at the window.  Look up when you reach the gate.Look at the window all the way from the gate to the door.”

In an instant, not even taking off her bonnet, she was sitting by the window waiting for him to appear.

A man approached, walking behind the hedge of lilacs which bordered the yard, and halted at the gate with an air of hesitation.She turned ghastly white:retribution was upon her.  It was Duvernois.

With that swift instinct of escape which sensitive and timorous creatures possess, she glided out of the room, through the upper hall, down a back stairway, into the garden behind the house, and so on to an orchard already obscure in the twilight.  Here she paused in her breathless flight, and burst into one of her frequent coughs, which she vainly attempted to smother.

“I was already dying,” she groaned.“Ah, why could he not have given me time to finish?”

From the orchard she could faintly see the road, and she now discovered Leighton returning briskly toward the house.Her first thought was, “He will look up at the window, and he will not see me!” Her next was, “They will meet, and all will be known!”

Under the sting of this last reflection she again ran onward until her breath failed.  She had no idea where she should go:her only purpose was to fly from immediate exposure and scorn to fly both from the man she detested and the man she loved.Her speed was quickened to the extent of her strength by the consideration that she was already missed, and would soon be pursued.

“Oh, don’t let them come! don’t let them find me!” she prayed to some invisible power, she could not have said what.

Mainly intent as she was upon mere present escape from reproachful eyes, she at times thought of lurking in the woods or in some neighboring village until Duvernois should disappear and leave her free to return to Leighton.But always the reflection came up, “Now he knows that I have deceived him; now he will despise me and hate me, and refuse to see me; now I can never go back.”

In such stresses of extreme panic and anguish an adult is simply a child, with the same overweight of emotions and the same imperfections of reason.During the moments when she was certain that Leighton would not forgive her, Alice made wild clutches at the hope that Duvernois might.There were glimpses of the earlier days of her married life; cheering phantoms of the days when she believed that she loved and that she was beloved phantoms which swore by altars and bridal veils to secure her pardon.

She imagined Duvernois overtaking her with the words, “Alice, I forgive your madness:  do you also forgive the coldness which drove you to it?”

She imagined herself springing to him, reaching out her hands for reconciliation, putting up her mouth for a kiss, and sobbing, “Ah, why were you not always so?”

Then of a sudden she scorned this fancy, trampled it under her weary, aching feet, and abhorred herself for being faithless to Leighton.

At last she reached a sandy, lonely coast-road, a mile from the village, with a leaden, pulseless, corpselike sea on the left, and on the right a long stretch of black, funereal marshes.Seating herself on a ruinous little bridge of unpainted and wormeaten timbers, she looked down into a narrow, sluggish rivulet, of the color of ink, which oozed noiselessly from the morass into the ocean.Her strength was gone:for the present farther flight was impossible, unless she fled from earth fled into the unknown.

This thought had indeed followed her from the house:at first it had been vague, almost unnoticed, like the whisper of some one far behind; then it had become clearer, as if the persuading fiend went faster than she through the darkness, and were overtaking her.Now it was urgent, and would not be hushed, and demanded consideration.

“If you should die,” it muttered, “then you will escape:moreover, those who now abhor you and scorn you, will pity you; and pity for the dead is almost respect, almost love.”

“Oh, how can a ruined woman defend herself but by dying?” She wept as she gazed with a shudder into the black rivulet.

Then she thought that the water seemed foul; that her body would become tangled in slimy reeds and floating things; that when they found her she would be horrible to look upon.But even in this there was penance, a meriting of forgiveness, a claim for pity.

Slowly, inch by inch, like one who proposes a step which cannot be retraced, she crept under the railing of the bridge, seated herself on the edge of the shaky planking and continued to gaze into the inky waters.

A quarter of an hour later, when the clergyman of Northport passed by that spot, returning from a visit to a dying saint of his flock, no one was there.

We must revert to the two husbands.  Duvernois had long wondered what could keep his wife in a sequestered hamlet, and immediately on her refusal to join him in a summer tour he had resolved to look into her manner of life.

At the village hotel he had learned that a lady named Duvernois had arrived in the place during the previous summer, and that she had been publicly married to a Doctor Leighton.He did not divulge his name he did not so much as divulge his emotions:he listened to this story calmly, his eyes fixed on vacancy.

At the door of the boarding-house he asked for Mrs. Duvernois, and then corrected himself, saying, “I mean Mrs. Leighton.”

He must have had singular emotions at the moment, yet the servant-girl noticed nothing singular in his demeanor.

Mrs. Leighton could not be found.  None of the family had seen her enter or go out:  it was not known that she had been in the house for an hour.

“But there comes Doctor Leighton,” remarked the girl as the visitor turned to leave.

Even in this frightful conjuncture the characteristic coolness of Duvernois did not forsake him:after a moment’s hesitation and a quick glance at his rival, he said, “I do not know him:I will call again.”

On the graveled walk which led from the yard gate to the doorstep the two men met and passed without a word the face of the one as inexpressive of the strangeness and horror of the encounter as the mind of the other was unconscious of them.

Leighton immediately missed Alice.  In a quarter of an hour he became anxious:in an hour he was in furious search of her.

Somewhat later, when Duvernois came once more to the house, accompanied by a fashionably-dressed youth, who, as it subsequently appeared, was his younger brother, he found the family and the neighborhood in wild alarm over the disappearance of Mrs. Leighton.  The two at once returned to the hotel, procured saddle-horses and joined in the general chase.

It was ten o’clock at night, and the moon was shining with a vaporous, spectral light, when the maddest of chances brought the two husbands together over a body which the tide, with its multitudinous cold fingers, had gently laid upon the beach.

Leighton leaped from his horse, lifted the corpse with a loud cry, and covered the white wet face with kisses.

Duvernois leaned forward in his saddle, and gazed at both without a word or a movement.

“Oh, what could have led her to this?” groaned the physician, already too sure that life had departed.

“Insanity,” was the monotoned response of the statue on horseback.

The funeral took place two days later:  the coffin-plate bore the inscription, “Alice Leighton, aged 23.”Duvernois read it, and said not a word.

“If you don’t claim her as your wife,” whispered the brother, “you may find it difficult to marry again.”

“Do you think I shall want to marry again?” responded the widower with an icy stare.

He was aware that he had lost a shame and a torment, and not aware that she might have been an honor and a joy, if only he had been able to love.

J. W. DE FOREST.