The sheriff was right. Sara Wrandall was an extraordinary woman,
if I may be permitted to modify his rather crude estimate of her.
It is difficult to understand, much less to describe a nature like
hers. Fine-minded, gently bred women who can go through an ordeal
such as she experienced without breaking under the strain are
rare indeed. They must be wonderful. It is hard to imagine a more
heart-breaking crisis in life than the one which confronted her
on this dreadful night, and yet she had faced it with a fortitude
that seems almost unholy.

She had loved her handsome, wayward husband. He had hurt her deeply
more times than she chose to remember during the six years of their
married life, but she had loved him in spite of the wounds up to
the instant when she stood beside his dead body in the cold little
room at Burton's Inn. She went there loving him as he had lived,
yet prepared, almost foresworn, to loathe him as he had died, and
she left him lying there alone in that dreary room without a spark
of the old affection in her soul. Her love for him died in giving
birth to the hatred that now possessed her. While he lived it
was not in her power to control the unreasoning resistless thing
that stands for love in woman: he WAS her love, the master of her
impulses. Dead, he was an unwholesome, unlovely clod, a pallid
thing to be scorned, a hulk of worthless clay. His blood was cold.
He could no longer warm her with it; it could no longer kill the
chill that his misdeeds cast about her tender sensitiveness; his
lips and eyes never more could smile and conquer. He was a dead
thing. Her love was a dead thing. They lay separate and apart. The
tie was broken. With love died the final spark of respect she had