It was only yesterday that her sister Charlotte had sat there, lamenting her imaginary woes. How Katharine had despised her! Had she not deliberately chosen, of her own free will, and was she not bound to stand by her choice, out of mere self-respect? And Katharine had felt then that, come what might, for good or ill, better or worse, honour or dishonour, she was glad that she had married John Ralston and that she would face all imaginable deaths to help him, even a little. But now--now, it was different. He had failed her at the very outset. It was not that others had turned upon him, despising him wholly for a partial fault. The public disgrace made it all worse than it might have been, but it was only secondary, after all. The keenest pain was from the thrust that had entered Katharine’s own heart. It had been with him as though she had not existed. He had not been strong enough, for her sake, on their wedding day--the day of days to her--to keep himself sober from three o’clock in the afternoon until ten o’clock at night. Only seven hours, Katharine repeated to herself in the cold snow-glare of the early morning--seven little hours; her lips were hot and dry with anger, and her hands were cold, as she thought of it. It was not only the weakness of him, contemptible as that was--if it had at least been weakness for something less brutal, less beastly, less degrading. Katharine chose the strongest words she could think of, and smote him with them in her heart. Was he not her husband, and had she not the right to hate and despise what he had done? It was bad enough, as she said it, and as it appeared to most people that morning. There was not a link missing in the evidence, from the moment when John had begun to lose his temper with Miner at the club, until he had been brought home insensible to his mother’s house by a couple of policemen. His relations and his best friends were all convinced that he had been very drunk, and there was no reason why society in general should be more merciful than his own people. Robert Lauderdale said nothing, but when he saw the paragraph in a morning paper describing ‘Mr. John R----’s drunken encounter with a professional pugilist,’ he regarded the statement as an elucidatory comment on his interview with his great-nephew. No one spoke of the matter in Robert Lauderdale’s presence, but the old gentleman felt that it was a distinct shame to the whole family, and he inwardly expressed himself strongly. The only one who tried to make matters look a little better than every one believed they were, was Hamilton Bright. He could not deny the facts, but he put on a cheerful countenance and made the best of them, laughing good-humouredly at John’s misfortune, and asking every one who ventured an unfavourable comment whether John was the only man alive on that day in the city of New York who had once been a little lively, recommending the beardless critics of his friend’s conduct to go