Very few of their former fashionable acquaintances showed the slightest sign of deserting them. Hollister had been one of the many victims of the dire panic, but it soon became generally understood that he was going to make honorable settlement with his creditors--that he was on the list of the seriously wounded, so to speak, and not on that of the killed. In many instances there was even an increase of civility. Cards were left at the door of the small house, just as they had been left at the door of the more spacious one. Society made it a matter of _amour propre_ not to drop them. It had taken them up; it could not afford to discountenance them for the single fault of a reduced income. The thorough-paced plutocrat is always very slow to admit his claims founded on anything so vulgar as a purely mercenary basis; and the aristocrat, on the other hand, will very often pay you a kind of proud loyalty when he has once openly ranked you as his equal. Moreover, both Claire and her husband had an ample personal popularity to fall back upon. They had been graceful and charming young figures, felicitously harmonizing with their festal background. Their absence left a sensible void. But it was an absence, and as such it continued. Claire's love for the superficial glitter and pomp of what she had always inwardly felt to be sham and falsity was no longer even a dumb sensation. It had become the merest memory, and by no means a pleasant one. She had changed for the last time in her life. The change was securely permanent, now. If she looked into the future and asked herself what unfulfilled desire lay there, it was always to thrill with the hope that Herbert might one day be rid of all financial worriment, and that their home, already lit and warmed by a precious mutual love, might receive the blessing of a happy tranquillity as well. For a long time this hope looked very far from being realized. She was untiringly devoted to his interests, and would hold long talks with him regarding the complicated and distracting nature of his affairs. Her apt mind, her ready and shrewd counsel, no longer surprised him; but he recognized with an untold joy the different motives that now spurred and animated her. In the end light began to break from darkness. Hollister still kept steady the extraordinary nerve which had before enabled him to set aflame and continue such astonishing pyrotechnics of speculation. It slowly and surely became evident to him that he would soon have steered clear of all disastrous reefs, and bring forth from the final dying rage of the big tempest a ship not so wholly shattered that careful repairs and cautious sailing hereafter might not keep it very seaworthy for many years.