n 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