This trio had been Leonora Gwynn's intimate coterie, and she knew just how they looked as they sat half undressed in the chilly midnight before the dying fire in a great bedroom, in the home of one of the three, their tresses--Maude Eldon's dark, and Margaret Duncan's brown, and Mildred Fisher's red-gold, with Leanna's interested face leaning above their gilded shimmer--hanging down over dressing-sacques or nightgowns, while they actively gesticulated at each other with handglass or brush, and with spirit disputed whether it was a chair which Rufus Gwynn had broken over Leonora's head, or did he merely drag her around by the hair--"Think of that, my dear,--by her hair!" It was a poor consolation, but this neither they, nor any other, would ever know. With the reflection Leonora set her even little teeth together as she still dreamily gazed into the fire. Other more obvious facts she could not conceal. Her stringent, hopeless poverty would bring a piteous expression to Judge Roscoe's face as occasion required him to seek to gather together some humble remnants of the estate her husband had recklessly flung away, for he had dissipated her fortune as well as desolated her heart. She needed no reminder, and indeed no word passed Judge Roscoe's lips of the settlements that he had drawn when he discovered that, despite all remonstrances, his orphaned niece was bent upon this marriage. Though Rufus Gwynn protested that he would sign them, she had tossed them into the fire like a heroine of romance, grandiloquently declaring that she would not trust herself to a man to whom she could not trust her fortune. How pleased her lover had been! How gay, gallant, triumphant! Later he found his account in her folly and a more substantial value than flattered pride, for by reason of her marriage the financial control of her guardian was abrogated, and her thousands slipped through her husband's fingers like sand at the gaming-table, the wine-rooms, the race-track, as with his wild, riotous companions he went his swift way to destruction and death. And even this did not alienate her, for her early admiration and foolish adoration had a continuance that a devotion for a worthier object rarely attains, and she loved him long, despite financial reverses and wicked waste and cruelty and neglect. She could have forgiven him aught, all, but his own unworthiness. Who can gauge the sophistries, the extenuations, the hopes, that delude a woman who clings to an ideal of her own tender fashioning, the dream of a fond heart, and the sacrifice of a loving young life. He left her not one vain imagining that she might still hold dear amidst the wreck of her existence. The crisis came at the end of a quarrel,--one of his own making,--a quarrel about a horse that he wished to sell;--oh, the trifle--the trifle that had wrought such woe!