So it was that Francis Tredethlyn began life under the advice of his friend Harcourt Lowther. After that conversation in the study the young husband no longer intruded himself upon his wife’s leisure, or attempted to identify himself with her pursuits. He found plenty to occupy his own time; for Harcourt Lowther always had some new scheme for his friend’s employment or amusement. A race, that no man living in the world could exist without seeing; a horse to be sold at Tattersall’s; a celebrated collection of pictures at Christie and Manson’s; a bachelor’s dinner at a club; a review at Wimbledon;--somehow or other there was always something to be seen, or something to be done, of a nature in which Mrs. Tredethlyn could neither have any part nor feel any interest; and when Francis and his friend dined alone with her, as they did very often, it happened somehow that the conversation was always of a horsy and masculine character, painfully wearisome to the ordinary female mind. If Mr. Lowther had been intent on widening the natural gulf which circumstances had set between these two people, he could scarcely have gone to work more skilfully than he did: though it is of course to be presumed that he was only an unconscious instrument, an involuntary agent of mischief and ruin. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXV. THE ROAD TO RUIN. Maude Tredethlyn took her new life very pleasantly. Her father was happy. There had been a reaction in the City; things were going very well for the Australian merchant; and Francis Tredethlyn was receiving handsome interest for his thirty thousand pounds. He brought these tidings to his wife’s boudoir one morning early in the new year. “I knew you’d be glad to hear it, Maude,” he said; “and now you see that it _was_ a very fine thing for me to get into your father’s business. So you need not have been uneasy about the matter, my darling.” Mrs. Tredethlyn lifted herself upon tiptoe, and pursed up the rosiest lips in Christendom. A kiss, transient as the passing flutter of a butterfly’s wing, alighted somewhere amid the thickets of the Cornishman’s beard. “You dear, good old Francis! That is the pleasantest news I ever heard, except----” “Except what, darling?” “The news that papa brought me home a year ago, when a generous friend stepped in between him and ruin.” Francis Tredethlyn blushed like a schoolgirl. “Oh, Frank, if I should ever forget that day!” said Maude, in a low voice, that had something of sadness in its tone.