But now the young matron shook off even the gentle fetters which had held the girl, and spread her pinions for a bolder flight. A much wider world had opened itself to the merchant’s daughter since her marriage. The story of Mr. Tredethlyn’s fortune--always multiplied by the liberal tongue of rumour--was one of the most popular topics amongst the denizens of the new district in which Mr. Tredethlyn’s house was situated. None of these West-end people knew that Lionel Hillary’s position had ever endured a dreadful crisis of uncertainty and terror. The marriage between Maude and Francis was supposed to be one of those sublime unions in which wealth is united to wealth--the alliance of a Miss Rothschild with a Master Lafitte--a grand commercial combination for the consolidation of capital. So Maude took her place as one of the most important novelties of the current year. She gave great receptions in her three drawing-rooms, whose gorgeous decorations were just a little too much like the velvet and ormolu magnificence of a public room at a gigantic hotel. She organized dinner-parties, and revised and corrected a _menu_, with the _savoir faire_ of a Brillat Savarin in petticoats. Always accustomed to a reckless expenditure, she had no idea of the necessity for some regulation in the expenses of a large household. Left a great deal to herself, and frequently at a loss for occupation, she often spent her husband’s money from sheer desire for amusement. After that unlucky encounter on the stairs, she resigned herself entirely to her position as a fashionable wife. Her husband went his way unmolested, and she went hers. She was tolerably happy, for the life was a very pleasant one to live; but oh, what a vain, empty, profitless existence to look back upon!--the success of a dinner, the triumph of an audacious toilette, the only landmarks on a great flat of frivolity. But Mrs. Tredethlyn was not at the age in which people are given to looking back; she was rich, beautiful, accomplished, agreeable, with that dash of recklessness in her gaiety which makes a woman such an acquisition in a drawing-room, and the fumes of the incense which her admirers burned before her were just a little intoxicating. The Twickenham loungers, who had worshipped her mutely and reverently from afar off, found themselves distanced now by bolder adorers, and, conversing amongst themselves upon the staircases and on the outer edges of crowded drawing-rooms in the stuccoed district, shook their heads and pulled their whiskers, gravely opining that Mrs. Tredethlyn was “going the pace.”