The dull autumn deepened into a winter of fierce cold, with scarcely a ray of sunshine. Elizabeth suffered from this as only one can suffer who has spent many winters under an Indian sun. Even if her pride had permitted her to call for assistance from their former friends, of whom she had scarcely one among the women, but many among the men, she dared not; she was afraid that McBean’s story had gone far and wide and that every action of hers might be under suspicion. And then came the crowning blow. The time passed when she might have returned the five hundred pounds advanced on the necklace. She could not pay it, having barely enough out of the one hundred pounds left her by Darrell to keep body and soul together. And no word came from Pelham. The spring advanced, and the trees in the Bayswater district grew green. The time returned when only a year before she had been adored by her husband and loved and revered by the man who was now treating her with insulting neglect,—for to this belief Elizabeth had at last been forced. She spent many nights walking up and down her narrow room wringing her hands at the thought of the last letter she had written Pelham. The first she had no regrets for. It had been sent under the impression that Pelham was not only a sincere man but a gentleman; for certainly, knowing as he did every circumstance of Elizabeth’s life and condition, it was ungentlemanlike of him to seize everything on which the law permitted him to lay his hands and to leave her destitute, alone, and a stranger. She felt that she could no longer doubt McBean’s word, of which nothing could have convinced her short of Pelham’s own conduct. Hope died hard within her, and she lingered in London during the spring and late summer; but as autumn came on she realized there was but one refuge left her, her father’s roof in Washington. She dared not let her intention of leaving London be known, for fear she might be stopped and a scandal might ensue. She raised money enough to take a second–class passage on a cheap steamer, and on a gloomy day in the last part of September she started upon her homeward journey. She had endured grief, anxiety, and privations, and especially that last overwhelming blow, the admission of Pelham’s faithlessness. It had transformed her delicate and seductive beauty, but strangely enough it had not rendered her less delicately seductive. The pathos of her eyes, the sadness of her smile, the droop of her beautiful mouth, her mourning attire, refined and even elegant, in spite of her poverty, marked her out. She was not less beautiful than in her days of joy, and was far more interesting. _Chapter Seven_