The count was thunderstruck.

"His wife!" he exclaimed.

"Before I was rich, you know," explained Florence. "A million
years ago it seems now, when I lived in a little town and was a
nobody."

"Anozzer romance of the Far Vest!" cried the count, to whom this
term embraced the entire continent from Maine to San Francisco.

Florence was curiously capricious in her treatment of Frank
Rignold. Often she would neglect him for weeks together, and then,
in a sort of revulsion, would go almost to the other extreme.
Sometimes at night, when he would be pacing the deck, she would
come and take his arm and call him Frank under her breath and ask
him if he still loved her; and in a manner half tender, half
mocking, would play on his feelings with a deliberate enjoyment of
the pain she inflicted. Her greatest power of torment was her
frankness. She would talk over her proposals; weigh one against
the other; revel in her self-analysis and solemnly ask Frank his
opinion on this or that part of her character. She talked with
equal freedom of her regard for himself, and was almost brutal in
confessing how hard it was to hold herself back.

"I think I must be awfully wicked, Frank," she said to him once.
"I love you so dearly, and yet I wouldn't marry you for anything!"
And then she ran on as to whether she ought to take Souvary and
live in Paris or Lord Comyngs and choose London. "It's so hard to