Little enough the peaceful scene reflected the feelings of these, its only human figures. Virginia Rawn was pale. Dark rings showed below her eyes. Her mouth drooped just a trifle, plaintively, in a way not usual with her. She was pale, paler than her usual clean and clear ivory. Yet she was coolly beautiful in her morning gown of light figured lawn, with its wide, flowing sleeves, showing her round white arms. Halsey, frowningly serious, felt the charm of her rise about him, overwhelm him. He knew that the hour had come for him in more ways than one; that hers, for ever, was the one face and figure and voice and presence for him, hopeless and unhappy, and doomed for ever so to remain. She was not his wife. She was the wife of another man--of his enemy; the man in all the world least like himself; the man who, by virtue of that unlikeness, had won this woman for his own. What hope for him, Charles Halsey, for whom was no place in the world? III Without much comment he placed before her the morning papers, with their glaring head-lines. "Well," said he, "it is the end." "Yes?" said she, smiling; "I suppose now we can learn all about our earlier life and career?" "Quite so. Here is the entire history of Mr. Rawn's career--what he did when he was a young man, where he came from, how he rose to power, how he failed and fell--it's all here. Here's the story of the International Power Company--they claim it was intended as a merger of all the traction companies of the eight leading cities of the country! Bond issue one to eight billion dollars, capitalization one to two hundred billion in stocks--you can take your choice in crazed figures. Here are biographical histories of all the known and unknown stock-holders. Here, Mrs. Rawn, is a picture of yourself, as well as one of Mr. Rawn and one more of the house here--a new view, I think. The photographer must have made a flashlight of the grounds." She smiled as he tried to jest, following his pointing finger along the blurred, brutal head-lines, shrieking their discordant, impossible and inconsistent tales. The first paper, the _Forum_, declared the ruin of John Rawn's fortune to be now beyond all hope of repair. Rawn himself--really at that time often in a helpless stupor in a New York hotel room--was reported to have fled the country. Halsey, his son-in-law, and Halsey's wife, who really had only denied themselves to visitors and reporters--were declared to be in hiding in some secret apartments of the great castle on the North Shore, a place actually but little known to any member of the select North Side society in which Rawn had been, more or less on sufferance, received. Rawn's wife was also located here, in a condition verging on insanity; according to the imagination of the writers, which, after all, was fatefully near to the truth.