by inch, like one who proposes a step which cannot be
retraced, she crept under the railing of the bridge, seated herself on the
edge of the shaky planking and continued to gaze into the inky waters.

A quarter of an hour later, when the clergyman of Northport passed by that
spot, returning from a visit to a dying saint of his flock, no one was
there.

We must revert to the two husbands. Duvernois had long wondered what could
keep his wife in a sequestered hamlet, and immediately on her refusal to
join him in a summer tour he had resolved to look into her manner of life.

At the village hotel he had learned that a lady named Duvernois had
arrived in the place during the previous summer, and that she had been
publicly married to a Doctor Leighton. He did not divulge his name--he did
not so much as divulge his emotions: he listened to this story calmly, his
eyes fixed on vacancy.

At the door of the boarding-house he asked for Mrs. Duvernois, and then
corrected himself, saying, "I mean Mrs. Leighton."

He must have had singular emotions at the moment, yet the servant-girl
noticed nothing singular in his demeanor.

Mrs. Leighton could not be found. None of the family had seen her enter or
go out: it was not known that she had been in the house for an hour.

"But there comes Doctor Leighton," remarked the girl as the visitor turned
to leave.

Even in this frightful conjuncture the characteristic coolness of
Duvernois did not forsake him: after a moment's hesitation and a quick
glance at his rival, he said, "I do not know him: I will call again."

On the graveled walk which led from the yard gate to the doorstep the two
men met and passed without a word--the face of the one as inexpressive of
the strangeness and horror of the encounter as the mind of the other was
unconscious of them.

Leighton immediately missed Alice. In a quarter of an hour he became
anxious: in an hour he was in furious search of her.

Somewhat later, when Duvernois came once more to the house, accompanied by
a fashionably-dressed youth, who, as it subsequently appeared, was his
younger brother, he found the family and the neighborhood in wild alarm
over the disappearance of Mrs. Leighton. The two at once returned to the
hotel, procured saddle-horses and joined in the general chase.

It was ten o'clock at night, and the moon was shining with a vaporous,
spectral light, when the maddest of chances brought the two husbands
together over a bod