In her own way, and with what truth was left to her, Molly Finucane did love Alistair Stuart. That was the part of it which others could not be expected to allow for. The life in the house in Chelsea had been as regular as that of any married pair. The only visitors received were Stuart’s friends. Molly had discarded all her old associates as completely as though she had been really married--always with the exception of Mendes, whom Alistair sometimes asked to dinner. She had practised what in her eyes was economy, playing the novel part of housekeeper, enjoying the strange experience of giving orders to tradesmen, and calculating the prices of household stuff. Unfortunately, she could not shake off at once the habits of reckless expense which she had been taught. Her nature had come to crave for excitement as an opium-eater’s craves for the drug, and the only amusements she knew were costly ones. The play, for Molly, meant a brougham, a little dinner at a smart restaurant, a private box, and a supper at some Bohemian night-club--in short, the spending of five or ten pounds. She went to the theatres and music-halls very often. On the nights when she did not go she felt disastrously bored, and wished herself dead. Then she had to have flowers every day, and a new bracelet or some such trifle every week, or she felt herself neglected. She had acquired the fatal idea that the love of men was only to be gauged by the money they spent on her. An unbroken stream of these offerings was necessary to convince her that Stuart had not tired of her. In reality, it was the attempt to live within his means which destroyed Lord Alistair’s credit. As soon as his tradesmen heard of the house in Chelsea they began to send in their bills, and as soon as the money-lenders heard that he was paying his debts they refused to help him. It was the Duke of Trent whom they had trusted to, and now they recollected that the Duke’s estates had come to him heavily mortgaged. They told Lord Alistair to apply to his brother, and his brother told him to leave Molly Finucane. Like the rest of the world, he believed that it was the house in Chelsea which had brought his brother down. Alistair had retorted by filing his petition. It was to be open war at last, he told himself. If the head of his house would not heed him, neither would he heed the honour of the house. And now, as he stood on the bridge and gazed at the spectacle of the night, it was borne in upon him more fully and more clearly that he was not without companions; that his case was not a solitary case, but that other houses besides the house of Trent and Colonsay had their younger sons and their failures; that other lands besides Oig had given their children to be devoured by the minotaur called Civilization; that his was only one of those broken lives which underlie the pageantry of empire, like the rubble underneath rich palace walls. * * * * *