The Dark Wood — Christine Weston

This is the moving and sympathetic story of a young war-widow who encounters a man so like her dead husband that she can transfer her affections to him in a kind of "fixation" that involves the principal characters of the novel in many arresting emotional situations and problems. The basic idea of "The Dark Wood" is one of especial importance and appeal in these days of deep interest in post-war psychological readjustments.

"The Dark Wood" is a novel of the present day. New York, a farm near the Maine sea-coast, and, in two brief and poignant episodes, a war-ravaged hilltown in Italy, are its backgrounds.

It is the story of Stella Harmon, for whom life stopped when the news came of her husband's death in action. She had been deeply in love with him, and now she lets herself go to pieces, physically and emotionally. Not ready to believe that her husband is actually dead, she goes to Italy to see his grave and make sure. But when she reaches the cemetery gate she can bring herself to go no farther - and returns to America. Her life becomes an evasion of realiy.

Meanwhile another important character enters the story, Colonel Mark Bycroft, who has returned from overseas to find his wife - a beautiful, selfish girl - no longer in love with him, and pressing for a divorce.

Bycroft, seeking release from a situation that grows daily more intolerable, takes to solitary drinking around in restaurants. One night Stella Harmon sees him, is startled by his resemblance to her dead husband, and makes up her mind to see him again, to find out who he is, and, if she can, to make his acquaintance. At first she loses track of him, but finally her systematic search is rewarded, and thereafter she haunts his path. The new interest Stella finds in life, through this unknown man, is reflected in her renewed attention to her physical appearance, and in her mental outlook as well.

Mark Bycroft has become aware that he is being pursued. One night at a restaurant, he sees this girl who is always following him and sends a note to her table to ask her why. She explains, and although he is skeptical of her genuineness, he agrees to spend some time in her company. And so a strange romance begins between these two bruised souls. It is a romance that can have a satisfactory ending only if the ghost of the dead husband is laid forever. How this comes about, and how the girl realizes that what she is missing in life is no longer the phantom husband but the man of flesh-and-blood, is the climax of the story - a story whose every chapter is charged with emotion, and whose characters are enmeshed in one of the strangest problems that ever tortured human minds and hearts.