an duchesses would no
doubt remain amiable. As for the household cavalry, probably some of
them were badly in need of forage, but that thin red line could hold out
until the younger sisters shed pinafores. So, after all, in spite of
double leads and the full column, the runaways could continue their
impromptu honeymoon without fear of parents, duchess, or a rescue charge
from that thin, red, and impecunious line.

* * * * *

It took Neergard all day to read that column before he folded it away
and pigeonholed it among a lot of dusty documents--uncollected claims, a
memorandum of a deal with Ruthven, a note from an actress, and the
papers in his case against the Siowitha Club which would never come to
a suit--he knew it now--never amount to anything. So among these
archives of dead desires, dead hopes, and of vengeance deferred _sine
die_, he laid away the soiled newspaper.

Then he went home, very tired with a mental lassitude that depressed him
and left him drowsy in his great arm-chair before the grate--too drowsy
and apathetic to examine the letters and documents laid out for him by
his secretary, although one of them seemed to be important--something
about alienation of affections, something about a yacht and Mrs.
Ruthven, and a heavy suit to be brought unless other settlement was
suggested as a balm to Mr. Ruthven.

To dress for dinner was an effort--a purely mechanical operation which
was only partly successful, although his man aided him. But he was too
tired to continue the effort; and at last it was his man alone who
disembarrassed him of his heavy clothing and who laid him among the
bedclothes, where he sank back, relaxed, breathing loudly in the
dreadful depressed stupor of utter physical and neurotic prostration.

Meaningless to him the hurriedly intrusive attorneys--his own and
Ruthven's--who forced their way in that night--or was it the next, or
months later? A weight like the weight of death lay on him, mind and
body. If he comprehended what threatened, what was coming, he did not
care. The world passed on, leaving him lying there, nerveless,
exhausted, a derelict on a sea too stormy for such as he--a wreck that
might have sailed safely in narrower waters.

And some day he'd be patched up and set afloat once more to cruise and
operate and have his being in the safer and smaller seas; some day, when
the nerve crash had subsided and the slow, wounded mind came back to
i