Left alone, Constantine lay staring into darkness, his harsh eyes winking and blinking, and the gnarled thick fingers, which had robbed so cleverly by way of mahogany-trimmed offices and which had written so many checks for his Gorgeous Girl, kept on their childish picking at the quilt. Yet his love for Beatrice, monument to his folly, never dimmed. He merely was beginning to realize the truth--too late to change it. And as the pain of loving his dead wife had never ceased throughout the years, so the new and more poignant pain of loving his daughter and knowing that she was in the wrong began tugging at his heartstrings. Well, he was the original culprit; he must see her through the game with flying colours. As for Steve--he envied him! In the morning Steve was accosted by Aunt Belle, who felt she must say her conventional, marcelled, gray-satin, and violet-perfumed reproaches. All Beatrice had told her was that Steve was now an impossible pauper, that he loved Mary Faithful and had loved her for years, that it was quite awful, and she was going to divorce him. Her aunt, with the proper emotions of a Gorgeous Girl's aunt, and uncomfortable memories of love in a cottage with the late Mr. Todd, began to upbraid Steve. She began in a cold, stereotyped fashion, calling his attention to the broken-hearted wife, the sick man who lay upstairs and who had befriended him, and of the social ostracism that was to result should he take such a drastic step. She felt it indelicate to mention Mary but she did say there were "other vicious deceits of which we are well aware, my young man," warning him that in years to come old age would bring nothing but remorse and terror, asking him what he would be forced to think when his marriage was recalled? "My marriage?" Steve answered, too pleasantly to be safe. "I dare say in time I'll come to realize it is always the open season for salamanders." Which left Aunt Belle with the wild thought that she must accompany Beatrice to Reno to sit out in the sagebrush for the best part of a year. Steve found his wife in her dressing room; she had waited as eagerly for his coming as she had done during the first days of their engagement. She, too, during a sleepless night had resolved that the only solution was a divorce, but she was going to have just as gay a time out of the event as was possible, which included making Steve as wretched as could be. Even with the rumours concerning Mary she believed, in the conceited fashion of all persons so cowardly that they merely consent to be loved, that Steve still adored her and that she was dealing with the deluded man of a few years ago. She wore a sapphire-coloured neglige with slippers to match, and lay in her chaise-longue gondola, her prayer books with their silver covers and a new Pom as touching details to the farewell tableau. Then Steve was permitted to come into the room.