for her frivolous
existence, she had forgotten that they were her husband's brokers.
Moreover the lack of perturbation in his manner was not calculated to
inspire alarm. But the news that Lyons had been shrewd enough to escape
at the twelfth hour without a dollar's loss heightened the justice of
the situation. She listened with throbbing pulses to the particulars.
She could scarcely credit her senses that her irrepressible and
light-hearted enemy had been confounded at last--confronted with
bankruptcy and probable disgrace. She interrupted the reading to express
her scepticism regarding the claim that Williams had no knowledge of the
frauds.

"How could he be ignorant? He must have known. He must have bribed the
reporters to put that in so as to arouse the sympathy of some of their
fashionable friends. Van Horne is dead, and the lips of the dead are
sealed."

Selma spoke with the confidence born of bitterness. She was pleased with
her acumen in discerning the true inwardness of the case. Her husband
nodded with mournful acquiescence. "It would seem," he said, "as if he
must have had an inkling, at least, of what was going on."

"Of course he had. Gregory Williams, with all his faults, was a
wide-awake man. I always said that."

Lyons completed the reading and murmured with a sigh, which was half
pity, half grateful acknowledgment of his own good fortune--"It's a bad
piece of business. I'm glad I had the sense to act promptly."

Selma was ruminating. Her steel bright eyes shone with exultation. Her
sense of righteousness was gratified and temporarily appeased. "They'll
have to sell their house, of course, and give up their horses and
steam-yacht? I don't see why it doesn't mean that Flossy and her husband
must come down off their pedestal and begin over again? It follows,
doesn't it, that the heartless set into which they have wormed their way
will drop them like hot coals?"

All these remarks were put by Selma in the slightly interrogative form,
as though she were courting any argument to the contrary which could be
adduced in order to knock it in the head. But Lyons saw no reason to
differ from her verdict. "It means necessarily great mortification for
them and a curtailment of their present mode of life," he said. "I am
sorry for them."

"Sorry? Of course, James, it is distressing to hear that misfortune has
befallen any person of one's acquaintance, and so far as Gregory
Williams himself is concerned I have