her from her remotest childhood, when she could remember hearing it
applied to her grandfather, the old Comte de la Ferronaise. After that
she could recollect leaving the great chateau in which she was born, and
living with her parents, first in one European capital, and then in
another. Finally they settled for a few years in Ireland, her mother's
country, where both her parents died. During all this time, as well as
in the subsequent years in a convent at Auteuil, she was never free from
the sense of ruin hanging over her. Though she understood well enough
that her way of escape lay in making a rich marriage, it was impressed
upon her that the meagreness of her _dot_ would make her efforts in this
direction difficult. When, within a few months of leaving the convent,
she was asked by George Eveleth to become his wife, it seemed as if she
had reached the end of her cares. She had the less scruple in accepting
what he had to give in that she honestly liked the generous, easy-going
man who lived but to gratify her whims. During the four years of her
married life she had spent money, not merely for the love of spending,
but from sheer joy in the sense that Poverty, the arch-enemy, had been
defeated; and lo! he was springing at her again.

"Ruin!" she echoed, when Mrs. Eveleth had let fall the word. "Do you
mean that we're--ruined?"

"It depends on how you look at it. You will always have your own small
fortune, on which you can live with economy."

"But you will have yours, too."

Mrs. Eveleth smiled faintly.

"No; I'm afraid that's gone. It was in George's hands, and I can see he
tried to increase it for me, by doing with it--as he did with his own.
I'm not blaming him. The worst of which he can be accused is a lack of
judgment."

"But there's this house!" Diane urged, "and all this furniture!--and
these pictures!"

She glanced up at the Watteau, the Boucher, and the Fragonard, which
gave the key to the decorations of the dainty boudoir. The faint smile
still lingered on Mrs. Eveleth's lips, as it lingers on the face of the
dead.

"There'll be very little left," she repeated.

"But I don't understand," Diane protested, with a perplexed movement of
the hand across her brow. "I don't know much about business, but if it
were explained to me I think I could follow."

"Come and sit beside me at the desk," Mrs. Eveleth suggested. "You will
understand better if you see the figures just as they stand."

She went ov