ous violinist.
In this way she managed to create a little artistic salon on the lines
of the famous political salons in which the brilliant women of the
eighteenth century moulded public opinion in France.

Alicia knew she was clever and as she stood admiring herself in front of
a full length mirror while awaiting the arrival of her guests she
congratulated herself that she had made a success of her life. She had
won those things which most women hold dear--wealth and social position.
She had married a man she did not love, it was true, but other women had
done that before her. If she had not brought her husband love she at
least was not a wife he need be ashamed of. In her Paquin gown of gold
cloth with sweeping train and a jeweled tiara in her hair, she
considered herself handsome enough to grace any man's home. It was
indeed a beauty which she saw in the mirror--the face of a woman not
yet thirty with the features regular and refined. The eyes were large
and dark and the mouth and nose delicately moulded. The face seemed
academically perfect, all but the expression. She had a cold,
calculating look, and a cynic might have charged her with being
heartless, of stopping at nothing to gain her own ends.

To-night Alicia had every reason to feel jubilant. She had secured a
social lion that all New York would talk about--no less a person than
Dr. Bernstein, the celebrated psychologist, the originator of the theory
of scientific psychology. Everything seemed to go the way she wished;
her musicales were the talk of the town; her husband had just presented
her with the jeweled tiara which now graced her head; there seemed to be
nothing in the world that she could not enjoy.

Yet she was not happy, and as she gazed at the face reflected before her
in the glass she wondered if the world guessed how unhappy she was. She
knew that by her own indiscretion she was in danger of losing all she
had won, her position in society, her place in the affections of her
husband, everything.

When she married Mr. Jeffries it was with deliberate calculation. She
did not love him, but, being ambitious, she did not hesitate to deceive
him. He was rich, he could give her that prominent position in society
for which she yearned. The fact that she was already engaged to a man
for whom she did care did not deter her for a moment from her set
purpose. She had met Robert Underwood years before. He was then a
college boy, tall, handsome, clever. She