w 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