During the summer of 1866, while his wife was in the country, he brought his Baltimore inamoretta to New York, and established her in his splendid mansion on the Avenue. With an impudence and infatuation perfectly astounding in so shrewd a man, he took no pains to conceal his conquest. Jauntily would he pace down Broadway with her on his arm in the morning, and in the evening she would be in waiting to accompany him home. Tidings of this open _liaison_ reached the lawyer's wife in her retreat among the Vermont hills, and she promptly came to New York and dislodged the mistress _pro tem_. Relatives of the infatuated widow also appeared at this juncture and strongly urged her to conquer her mad infatuation, while a like appeal was made to the lawyer. But he was deaf to reason. He refused to give up his idol, and the widow declared her intention, to use her own language, "of sticking to him as long as he had a button on his coat." Time sped on. The lawyer's passion began to be exhausted, and the unending insistence of her's began to excite his repugnance. As Ouida happily remarked, "A woman who is ice to his fire, is less pain to a man than the woman who is fire to his ice." There is hope for him in the one, but only a dreary despair in the other. In the latter part of 1867, the lawyer began to realize the force of this philosophy. The amorous widow was then boarding at the Metropolitan Hotel, and he began to take the initiatory steps to be rid of her. After two years of madness, during which she had sacrificed the respect of every relative she had, including her own daughter, a pretty girl in her teens, it was hardly likely that he would evince the moral courage to declare openly and straightforward to her that their relations must end. On the contrary, he invoked the aid of three lawyers--two of them her own cousins, the other bearing an historic name--to kidnap and spirit her out of the city. First they forcibly conveyed her to police headquarters. Then, in spite of tears and protestations, she was kept all night in a dark room. Her screams and entreaties might have moved a heart of stone, but they were unavailing. In the morning she saw Superintendent Kennedy, and demanded the cause of the outrage. He informed her that she had been brought there on a charge of being insane about the lawyer. A physician was summoned, and by his direction, after he had submitted her to an examination, she was sent back to her hotel. During the same afternoon, the lawyer called and emphatically denied having had any hand in her contemplated imprisonment, and secured her release, conveniently imputing the conspiracy to the jealousy of his wife.