He commenced the old life as if he had never been married. The familiar sound of pipes and beer, and supper after the play, often with young ladies who had been assisting in the representation on the stage, was traveled as if there had been no Mrs. Dobb at home in the flat old Dobb provided. Frank's expenditures on himself were as lavish as they had been in his bachelor days. As little Brown said, it was lucky that Mrs. Dobb had a father-in-law to buy her dinner for her. She rarely came to her husband's studio, because he claimed that it interfered with the course of business. He had invented a fiction that she was too weak to endure the strain of society, and so he took her into it as little as possible. In brief, married by the caprice of a selfish man, the poor little woman lived through a couple of neglected years, and then died of a malady as nearly akin to a broken heart as I can think of, while Frank was making a trip to the Bahamas on the yacht of his friend Munnybagge, of the Stock Exchange. He had set out on the voyage ostensibly to make studies, for he was a marine painter, on the principle, probably, that marines are easiest to paint. When he came back and found his wife dead, he announced that he would move his studio to Havana for the purpose of improving his art. He did so, putting off his mourning suit the day after he left New York and not putting it on again, as the evidence of creditable witnesses on the steamer and in Havana has long since proved. His son's callousness was a savage stab in old Dobb's heart. A little, mild-looking old gentleman, without a taint of selfishness or suspicion in his own nature, he had not seen the effect of his indulgence of him on his son till his brutal disregard for his first duty as a man had told him of it. The old man had appreciated and loved his daughter-in-law. In proportion as he had discovered her unhappiness and its just cause, he had lost his affection for his son. I hear that there was a terrible scene when Frank came home, a week after his wife had been buried. He claimed to have missed the telegram announcing her death to him at Nassau, but Munnybagge had already told some friends that he had got the dispatch in time for the steamer, but had remained over till the next one, because he had a flirtation on hand with little Gonzales, the Cuban heiress, and old Dobb had heard of it. Munnybagge never took him yachting again; and, speaking to me once about him, he designated him, not by name, but as "that infernal bloodless cad."