Hugh Benton was wrong in believing that matters would right themselves when Geraldine’s nerves should be soothed. He was to learn that she had but dropped the mask that had irked her through all the year that she had been making for herself the place that she was determined to have—bringing Hugh Benton to an abject posture beneath her feet. For the scene she had made about the string of pearls had been but the woman’s opening gun in her new campaign. It was the first of her quarrels with her husband, but others followed in such rapid succession that the first was not long in being lost sight of. Elinor left them the week following her denunciation by her step-mother. She met some friends who invited her to spend the winter in Italy. She was delighted at the chance to escape from her unhappy surroundings, and Hugh was glad to let her go. He had come to know the impossibility of keeping her under the same roof with Geraldine. Alone with his new wife, there began a life so terrible for Hugh Benton, that at times he was almost certain it could not be true. He was merely having a dreadful nightmare from which he would suddenly awaken. Geraldine seemed fairly to thrive upon quarrels and violent scenes. At first, Hugh attempted to plead or remonstrate, or argue with her; but he soon found that that was the thing she craved, so he simply lapsed into silence until the tirade was over. But oh! how it told on him! How it crushed the manhood within him and made of him a thing he himself despised! [Illustration: Hugh Benton (Huntly Gordon) comes to his daughter’s assistance. (_“The Valley of Content” screened as “Pleasure Mad.”_)] On their return to New York Geraldine had redecorated “The Castle,” but he never entered it without seeing before him a vision of Marjorie, as she stood in the library that never-to-be-forgotten night, completely rejuvenated and beautiful, trying to rekindle his love and pleading with him to give up his engagement and take her to the theater. Surely that was the night on which God had forsaken him, or he would have listened to her pleadings, and have been spared all this torture. Hugh Benton knew he was nearing the end of the road. His associates recognized the change in the man, but there was little sympathy such as might have been expected for a man, old and broken before his time, from any other cause than the one which had aged and grayed the financier. For the first time in his life, he bowed his head, content to take the lashings of Fate because of sheer inability longer to fight. He had been vanquished by a woman—a woman for whose sake he had driven wife and children from him, had outlawed his friends, cut short his life. As he drooped into his office one morning, he felt that the end could not be far off. And he welcomed it. One more blow from the hand of Fate——