John travels back and forth between London and Hazlehurst, wooing Laura (despite alluding repeatedly to a dark and awful past) and eventually marrying her on New Year's Eve, just in time to fulfill the conditions of the will.

The couple is unhappy; La Chicot drinks too much and flies into rages, while Jack has fallen out of love with his wife and has failed as a painter, making a poor living selling caricatures to comic journals.

Although Jack has fallen out of love with La Chicot, she has gained the attention of two other men: Joseph Lemuel, a millionaire, and George Gerard, a poor but dedicated doctor.

In Jack's absence, La Chicot is injured in an accident on stage and nursed back to health by George Gerard; she is also plied with expensive gifts by Mr. Lemuel, who has secretly enrolled Desrolles as an ally in wooing her.

Edward Clare, an aspiring poet from Hazlehurst who moved to London to seek his fortune, has a chance encounter with Jack Chicot, who he noticed has an exact likeness with John Treverton.

He travels to France with his lawyer, Mr. Sampson, and finds evidence that La Chicot was indeed married to the sailor, meaning that John's marriage to her was never legal and therefore that the terms of the will were fulfilled.

"[3] The Cloven Foot has been identified as part of an 1870s trend in sensational novels towards middle-class criminals and "white-collar" crime such as fraud, in the midst of broadening property rights for married women.