His wooing was prompt and picturesque. But possession with him was _ennui_, and in the most childish fashion he ceased to prize the thing he obtained, and treated it with as much indifference as he had sought it with zeal. Katherine, finding marriage an irremediable failure, had at length resorted to that haven for the incompatibles--the divorce court. From a crude Western town, where they had cyclones for breakfast, she had only recently emerged, chastened in spirit and with a very formal red-sealed document in her keeping. It was what she had waited so patiently for, yet now that it was in her possession she felt like going into mourning. It seemed indecent to act as though nothing had happened. She kept Dick’s old letters and cried over them, and wore a picture of him--taken during their happy engagement--in a heart-shaped locket inside her bodice. Quite unusual with young and handsome divorcées, there was no other man in the case. She had not divorced Dick to marry some one else, but because of their incompatibility, which absolutely prevented their living together in harmony. But no sooner was she settled in her old home than she began receiving proposals. Her old beaux came flocking around her, in more or less damaged condition, and there seemed a general belief that she had divorced Dick only to try it again with a new candidate for Dick’s shoes. Her women friends were as bad. They would not permit her to pass into retirement, but insisted upon her accepting invitations. “Now you are free,” they told her, “you must make up for that miserable period of your married life by being as gay as possible.” They turned a deaf ear to remonstrances. Katherine could not deny that a wonderful peace was settling over her soul, freed from the wearing grind of Dick’s perpetual bickerings, and she tried to blot out the memory of his faults and to think of him kindly as one does of the dead. But she lived in the dread of meeting him, for she knew he still was in town, where he had remained throughout, gallantly permitting her to secure the decree without a contest. Poor Dick, how like him! For, whatever his faults, he was always a gentleman. She trembled at the thought of meeting him, for, unmarried to him, it was easier to think of his fascinations than of his shortcomings. It had never become possible for her to treat the matter as some of her similarly placed women friends and to joke flippantly about “my former.”