"
The following days were cycles of torture to Alice. She groveled
in the shadow of a great dread. It seemed to her that Beverley
could not love her, could not help looking upon her as a poor,
wild, foolish girl, unworthy of consideration. She magnified her
faults and crudities, she paraded before her inner vision her
fecent improprieties, as they had been disclosed to her, until she
saw herself a sort of monstrosity at which all mankind was gazing
with disgust. Life seemed dry and shriveled, a mere jaundiced
shadow, while her love for Beverley took on a new growth,
luxuriant, all-embracing, uncontrollable. The ferment of spirit
going on in her breast was the inevitable process of self-
recognition which follows the terrible unfolding of the passion-
flower, in a nature almost absolutely simple and unsophisticated.
Vincennes held its breath while waiting for news from Helm's
expedition. Every day had its nimble, yet wholly imaginary account
of what had happened, skipping from mouth to mouth, and from cabin
to cabin. The French folk ran hither and thither in the persistent
rain, industriously improving the dramatic interest of each
groundless report. Alice's disturbed imagination reveled in the
kaleidoscopic terrors conjured up by these swift changes of the
form and color of the stories "from the front," all of them more
or less tragic.
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