out of what they call wildcat schemes, when all the time they were
leading him to ruin."

Ruin! The word appealed to Diane's memory and imagination alike. It came
to 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 château 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."