CHAPTER IV.
THREE weeks after that day Isaac and Rebecca were man and wife. All that was hopelessly dogged and stubborn in the man’s moral nature seemed to have closed round his fatal passion, and to have fixed it unassailably in his heart.
After that first interview in the cottage parlor no consideration would induce Mrs. Scatchard to see her son’s wife again or even to talk of her when Isaac tried hard to plead her cause after their marriage.
This course of conduct was not in any degree occasioned by a discovery of the degradation in which Rebecca had lived. There was no question of that between mother and son. There was no question of anything but the fearfully-exact resemblance between the living, breathing woman and the specter-woman of Isaac’s dream.
Rebecca on her side neither f
