It was apparently a secret passage in her life.

During our long association together she gave no hint of it.

She confessed the truth on her deathbed.
In justice to her memory let me say that she believed her husband dead." Robert Turold told this with unmoved face in barest outline--etched in dry-point, as it were--leaving his hearers to fill in the picture of the unhappy woman who had gone through life tormented by the twin demons of conscience and fear, which had overtaken her and brought her down before she could reach the safe shelter of the grave.
Mrs.Pendleton, whose robust mind had scant patience with the policy of cowardice which dictates death-bed confessions, regretted that Alice, having remained silent so long, had not kept silence altogether.
"You do not intend to make this scandal public, Robert ?" she said anxiously.
"I am compelled to do so," was the gloomy response.
"Is it necessary ?" she pleaded.

"Cannot the story be kept quiet--if not for Alice's sake, at least for Sisily's?
You must consider her above all things.

She is your daughter, your only child." "I agree with Aunt," said Charles Turold.