he knew he would
not care for any other woman in the way he cared for her, he preferred
to care in that way, even for one who was lost, than in a lesser way
for a possible she who some day might greatly care for him. So she
still remained in his thoughts, and was so constantly with him that he
led a dual existence, in which by day he directed the affairs of an
alien and hostile people and by night again lived through the wonderful
moments when she had thought she loved him, when he first had learned
to love her. At times she seemed actually at his side, and he could
not tell whether he was pretending that this were so or whether the
force of his love had projected her image half around the world.

Often, when in single file he led the men through the forest, he seemed
again to be back on Cape Cod picking his way over their own lost road
through the wood, and he heard "the beat of a horse's feet and the
swish of a skirt in the dew." And then a carbine would rattle, or a
horse would stumble and a trooper swear, and he was again in the
sweating jungle, where men, intent upon his life, crouched in ambush.

She spared him the mockery of wedding-cards; but the announcement of
the wedding came to him in a three-months-old newspaper. Hoping they
would speak of her in their letters, he kept up a somewhat one-sided
correspondence with friends of Mrs. Stedman's in Boston, where she now
lived. But for a year in none of their letters did her name appear.
When a mutual friend did write of her Lee understood the silence.

From the first, the mutual friend wrote, the life of Mrs. Stedman and
her husband was thoroughly miserable. Stedman blamed her because she
came to him penniless. The rich aunt, who had heartily disapproved of
the artist, had spoken of him so frankly that Frances had quarrelled
with her, and from her no longer would accept money. In his anger at
this Stedman showed himself to Frances as he was. And only two months
after their marriage she was further enlightened.

An irate husband made him the central figure in a scandal that filled
the friends of Frances with disgust, and that for her was an awakening
cruel and humiliating. Men no longer permitted their womenfolk to sit
to Stedman for a portrait, and the need of money grew imperative. He
the more blamed Frances for having quarrelled with her aunt, told her
it was for her money he had married her, that she had ruined his
career, and that she was to blame