"There are all sorts of rumors. He came up from Washington unexpectedly, and his wife met him at the station with their team. They went to the hotel first, and then suddenly started for the farm in the midst of the storm. It was a terrible storm…. One story is that he had trouble with a bank; it is even said he had forged paper. I don't know! … Another story was about the Adams woman,—you know she followed him to Washington…. Too bad! He was a brilliant fellow, but he tied himself all up, tied himself all up," he observed sententiously, thus explaining the catastrophe of an unbalanced character.
"You mean it was—suicide?" Isabelle questioned.
"Looks that way!"
"How awful! and his wife killed, too!"
"He was always desperate—uncontrolled sort of fellow. You remember how he went off the handle the night of our dinner."
"So he ended it—that way," she murmured.
And she saw the man driving along the road in the black storm, his young wife by his side, with desperate purpose. She remembered his words in the orchard, his wistful desire for another kind of life. "The Adams woman, too," as John expressed it, and "he couldn't hold his horses." This nature had flown in pieces, liked a cracked wheel, in the swift revolution of life. To her husband it was only one of the messes recorded in the newspapers. But her mind was full of wonder and fear. As little as she had known the man, she had felt an interest in him altogether disproportionate to what he said or did. He was a man of possibilities, of streaks, of moods, one that could have been powerful, lived a rich life. And at thirty-three he had come to the end, where his passions and his ideals in perpetual warfare had held him bound. He had cut the knot! And she had chosen to go with him, the poor, timid wife! … Surely there were strange elements in people, Isabelle felt, not commonly seen in her little well-ordered existence, traits of character covered up before the world, fissures running back through the years into old impulses. Life might be terrible—when it got beyond your hand. She could not dismiss poor Tom Darnell as summarily as John did,—"a bad lot, I'm afraid!"
"You mustn't think anything more about it," her husband said anxiously, as she sat staring before her, trying to comprehend the tragedy. "I have arranged to take you on to-morrow. The Colonel writes that your brother Ezra is seedy,—touch of malaria, he thinks. The Colonel is looking forward a lot to your coming."
He talked on about the little domestic things, but she held that picture in the background of her mind and something within her said over and over, 'Why should it be like that for any one!'
And all the next day, on their way to St. Louis, she could not dismiss the thought from her mind: 'Why, I saw him only a few weeks ago. How well he read that poetry, as if he enjoyed it! And what he said that night at dinner he really meant,—oh, he believed it! And he was sorry for his wife,—yes, I am sure he was sorry for her. But he loved the other woman,—she understood him. And so he ended it. It's quite dreadful!'