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.