Meanwhile, the girl for whom John Dinsmore had risked his noble life a second time, was pacing up and down the floor of her elegant suite of rooms, with a very perturbed countenance, reading for the twentieth time the letter which her mother had but just received, read but half through, and had fainted outright; recovering only to go from one violent fit of hysterics into another. Queenie Trevalyn had read it slowly through twice, controlling her emotions with a supreme effort. It was from her father, and announced his utter failure in New York. He had made an unsuccessful venture in Wall Street, and the result was that every dollar he had on earth had been swept from him. “When you return to the city,” he wrote, “instead of your own home, it will be to a boarding house. For myself I care not; but my heart bleeds for you, my dear wife, and Queenie, knowing full well how much you both love the luxurious trappings of wealth and position! But my grief cannot mend matters. Our only hope of retrieving our fallen fortunes is by Queenie marrying money.” CHAPTER V. THE POWER OF GOLD. “The eagle suffers little birds to sing, And is not careful what they mean thereby, Knowing that with the shadow of his wing He can at pleasure stint their melody.” Queenie Trevalyn did not go into hysterics over her father’s letter, as her mother had done. Instead, she was very angry. “How dare a man, who has a family on his hands dependent upon him for support, to risk his fortune in speculation?” she stormed. “The man who is mad enough to do it should be sent to an insane asylum, and confined there for the rest of his natural life!” “But what are we to do, my dear?” queried the weeping mother, in a sobbing, querulous voice. “I have always lived in elegance; how am I to enter a New York boarding house? I--I should fall down dead on the threshold! I ask you, what are we to do, Queenie!” And off the poor lady went into another violent spasm of hysterics. “The genteel poor; how I have always pitied them!” went on the sobbing lady, her tears falling afresh. “Poor people who carry about them traces of former greatness. How our set will comment on our downfall, Queenie, and turn their heads the other way as they pass us by on the street; they riding in their carriages, and we tramping through the dust afoot. Oh, I can never endure it, Queenie! I will take to my bed and remain there until the day I die. I have read of poverty in novels, and always pitied the poor heroine. I never imagined that I should one day be in a similar position myself. Oh, dear, if I could have only died ere this dark dawn fell upon us!” “If you will only dry your tears long enough to listen to what I have to say, and talk the matter over with me, I may be able to suggest a path out of the labyrinth. You have given me no opportunity to tell you a piece of news that may, in your estimation, offset this dreadful calamity.”