urged her to conquer her mad infatuation,
while a like appeal was made to the lawyer. But he was deaf to reason.
He refused to give up his idol, and the widow declared her intention, to
use her own language, "of sticking to him as long as he had a button on
his coat."

Time sped on. The lawyer's passion began to be exhausted, and the
unending insistence of her's began to excite his repugnance. As Ouida
happily remarked, "A woman who is ice to his fire, is less pain to a man
than the woman who is fire to his ice." There is hope for him in the
one, but only a dreary despair in the other. In the latter part of 1867,
the lawyer began to realize the force of this philosophy. The amorous
widow was then boarding at the Metropolitan Hotel, and he began to take
the initiatory steps to be rid of her. After two years of madness,
during which she had sacrificed the respect of every relative she had,
including her own daughter, a pretty girl in her teens, it was hardly
likely that he would evince the moral courage to declare openly and
straightforward to her that their relations must end. On the contrary,
he invoked the aid of three lawyers--two of them her own cousins, the
other bearing an historic name--to kidnap and spirit her out of the
city. First they forcibly conveyed her to police headquarters. Then, in
spite of tears and protestations, she was kept all night in a dark room.
Her screams and entreaties might have moved a heart of stone, but they
were unavailing. In the morning she saw Superintendent Kennedy, and
demanded the cause of the outrage. He informed her that she had been
brought there on a charge of being insane about the lawyer. A physician
was summoned, and by his direction, after he had submitted her to an
examination, she was sent back to her hotel. During the same afternoon,
the lawyer called and emphatically denied having had any hand in her
contemplated imprisonment, and secured her release, conveniently
imputing the conspiracy to the jealousy of his wife.

Meantime, however, the lawyer and his fellow-accomplices of the law were
plotting to get the wretched woman placed in some private asylum.
Bloomingdale and Flushing asylums were full, and as she continued to
follow her whilom lover and importune him to visit her, he found it
politic and convenient to renew his attentions and to feign a revival of
his passion. In a certain sense, he was to be pitied. Love of this kind
begins as a gift; but a woman of this