she had ever imagined,
were of no more interest to her than a drawerful of outworn gloves. She
bought horses till she could no longer tell them apart; her carriages
crowded three supplementary stables in the neighbourhood. Her flowers,
miracles of laborious cultivation, filled the whole house with their
fragrance. Wherever she went deference moved before her like a guard;
her beauty, her enormous wealth, her wonderful horses, her exquisite
gowns made of her a cynosure, a veritable queen.

And hardly a day passed that Laura Jadwin, in the solitude of her own
boudoir, did not fling her arms wide in a gesture of lassitude and
infinite weariness, crying out:

"Oh, the ennui and stupidity of all this wretched life!"

She could look forward to nothing. One day was like the next. No one
came to see her. For all her great house and for all her money, she had
made but few friends. Her "grand manner" had never helped her
popularity. She passed her evenings alone in her "upstairs
sitting-room," reading, reading till far into the night, or, the lights
extinguished, sat at her open window listening to the monotonous lap
and wash of the lake.

At such moments she thought of the men who had come into her life--of
the love she had known almost from her girlhood. She remembered her
first serious affair. It had been with the impecunious theological
student who was her tutor. He had worn glasses and little black side
whiskers, and had implored her to marry him and come to China, where he
was to be a missionary. Every time that he came he had brought her a
new book to read, and he had taken her for long walks up towards the
hills where the old powder mill stood. Then it was the young
lawyer--the "brightest man in Worcester County"--who took her driving
in a hired buggy, sent her a multitude of paper novels (which she never
read), with every love passage carefully underscored, and wrote very
bad verse to her eyes and hair, whose "velvet blackness was the shadow
of a crown." Or, again, it was the youthful cavalry officer met in a
flying visit to her Boston aunt, who loved her on first sight, gave her
his photograph in uniform and a bead belt of Apache workmanship. He was
forever singing to her--to a guitar accompaniment--an old love song:

"At midnight hour Beneath the tower He murmured soft, 'Oh nothing
fearing With thine own true soldier fly.'"

Then she had come to Chicago, and Landry Court, with his bright
enthusiasms and fine exa