He was fond of her and proud of her and glad to see her admired as long as the admiration was unsought, but when with the little arts she knew so well she tried to attract attention his jealousy was aroused, and gradually there came to be stormy scenes between them,—bitter quarrels when things were said on both sides which it was hard to forget. Finding that with all his apparent unconcern he was sore on the subject of his antecedents Helen used that as a lash and often reminded him of the difference in their social positions and the depth to which she stooped when she married him. Then they quarreled more fiercely than ever and the baby was made the instrument of goading Mark to madness. That it had a drop of blood in its veins which could be traced back to a scaffold was often a source of regret with Helen coupled with a wish that she had married Craig Mason instead of throwing herself away on a hotel clerk, with no family connections. Mark was not naturally bad-tempered; neither was Helen. They were simply wholly unsuited to each other. They had married in haste, trampling upon the rights and happiness of Craig Mason without remorse, and as a natural sequence reaped the consequence of their sin. At last, after a sharp altercation in which Helen expressed a wish that she had never seen her husband, he left her, taking Jeff with him and leaving a note saying he should not return as he was tired of the life he was living. Urged on by her mother, who had never accepted Mark as a son-in-law, a divorce was easily obtained and Helen free from the tie which had become so distasteful to her. Chancing to know that Mark was in Denver she sent him a copy of the divorce and received in return the note of which Fanny had told Roy. After that she knew no more of him until she heard of a terrible explosion in some mine in Montana. Among the killed was Mark Hilton’s name. Then in an agony of remorse she tried to verify the report. What she learned was that none of the bodies could be identified, they were so bruised and burned. Mark was known to have been in the mine and never seen after. Of Jeff nothing was known. He might, or might not, have been in the mine. In all human probability Mark was dead, and the divorce, of which she did not like to think, need not have been obtained. She was free without it and always spoke of herself to her friends as a widow, although she wore no black. If any of her old tenderness for Mark Hilton returned to her at times she gave no sign and was outwardly unchanged, except that she was very quiet and shunned society rather than courted it.