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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."
"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.
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. "How Mother Did It."
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.
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.
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.
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."
La Vérité, a newspaper usually well informed, says that for some days past the flour which had been stored in the town by M. Clément Duvernois has been exhausted, and that we are now living on the corn and meal which was introduced at the last moment from the neighbouring departments.
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.
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.
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