Even trifles are of moment in the stagnation of interest in a country neighborhood. Some vague rumor of the little incident that these two had been thus seen publicly together penetrated beyond the purview of the parishioners of St. John’s in the Wilderness. The association of names came thus to the ears of Paula Floyd-Rosney, and urged her to an action which she had been contemplating, but had relegated to a future propitious opportunity. It forced precipitancy upon her. If she intended to move at all time must be taken into account, and the untoward chance of interference with her plans. She was now indeed the arbiter of her own destiny, she told herself. Her suit for divorce had been abated by reason of the death of Floyd-Rosney, and she was in the enjoyment of one-half of his princely estate in Mississippi--where the right of dower has been annulled and a child’s part substituted as the share of the wife--and also the “widow’s third” in Tennessee, for he had died intestate. She was young, and her spirits rebounded with the prospect of the rehabilitation of her happiness. Her heart bore, it is true, some sorry scars which it would carry to the judgment day. But she could not feel, she could not even feign, grief for her husband’s fate; she knew it was liberation for her and his child. She had donned, in deference to the urgency of Mrs. Majoribanks, a fashionable version of widow’s weeds, and she had intended to allow the traditional time of mourning to expire before she made haste to gather the treasures of youth and love that she had so recklessly thrown away. She had not even regret for the disaster of Duciehurst. She regarded its destruction as the solution of a problem. She would not have wished to win in the lawsuit the estate she felt was morally and equitably the property of her former lover. It was delightful to her to be in the position to bestow, and not to receive. She was in case to make brave amends for her fickle desertion of Ran Ducie at the summons of wealth and splendor. She would go back to him a prize beyond computation--the woman he loved and had always loved, but endowed like a princess and looking like a queen. The expectation embellished her almost out of recognition; her closest friends and casual guests--for she had returned to her own home, from which she had fled--could but exclaim as her beauty expanded. “How I loved him!” she would whisper to herself, and sometimes she wondered if those five dread years under the yoke were not heavy payment for the fortune she was bringing him. The consciousness of this great wealth made her the more confident, the more plausible in the letter she wrote him. Though she had feared supplantation, it was only because he might be in ignorance of her attitude toward him.