She did not expect nor desire any communication, and was not therefore disappointed, but rather relieved from what would have only proved a cause of disturbance.

All angry feelings toward her husband had subsided; but no tender impulses moved in her heart, nor did the feeblest thought of reconciliation breathe over the surface of her mind.

She had been in bonds; now the fetters were cast off, and she loved freedom too well to bend her neck again to the yoke.
No tender impulses moved, we have said, in her heart, for it lay like a palsied thing, dead in her bosom--dead, we mean, so far as the wife was concerned.

It was not so palsied on that fatal evening when the last strife with her husband closed.

But in the agony that followed there came, in mercy, a cold paralysis; and now toward Hartley Emerson her feelings were as calm as the surface of a frozen lake.
And how was it with the deserted husband?
Stern and unyielding also.
The past year had been marked by so little of mutual tenderness, there had been so few passages of love between them--green spots in the desert of their lives--that memory brought hardly a relic from the past over which the heart could brood.