The Sword of Damocles: A Story of New York Life

"Instead of that, he gave me a queer inexplicable smile, and merely said, 'I want to see the greenbacks, my lad. No color so good as green, not even the black upon white of 'I promise to pay.'

"I went back to my desk in the bank, chagrined. Ona had told me a few days before that she was tired of waiting, that the young doctor from the next town was very assiduous in his attentions, and as there was no question as to his ability to support a wife, why – she did not finish her sentence, but the toss of her head and her careless tone at parting, were enough to inflame the jealousy of a less easily aroused nature than mine. I felt that I was in hourly danger of losing her, and all because I could not satisfy her father with a sight of the few thousands which were so soon to be mine.

"The reading of my aunt's will, which confirmed my hopes, did not greatly improve matters. 'I want to see the money,' the old gentleman repeated; and I was forced to wait the action of the law and the settlement of the estate. It took longer than even he foresaw. Weeks went by and my poor little five thousand seemed as far from my control as on the day the will was read. There was some trouble, I was not told what, that made it seem improbable that I should reap the benefit of my legacy for some time. Meanwhile Ona accepted the attentions of the young doctor, and my chances of winning her, dwindled rapidly day by day. I became morbidly eager and insanely jealous. Instead of pursuing my advantage – for I undoubtedly possessed one in her own secret inclination towards me – I stood off, and let my rival work his way into her affections unhindered. I was too sore to interrupt his play, as I called it, and too afraid of myself to actually confront him in her presence. But the sight of them riding together one day, was more than I could endure even in my spirit of unresistance. 'He shall not have her,' I cried, and cast about in my mind how to bring my own matters into such shape as to satisfy her father and so win her own consent to my suit. My first thought was to borrow the money, but that was impracticable in a town where each man's affairs are known to his neighbor. My next was to hurry up the settlement of the estate by appeal to my lawyer. The result of the latter course was a letter of many promises, in the midst of which a great temptation assailed me.

"Colonel Japha, of whose history you have heard more or less true accounts, was at that time living in the old mansion you took such pains to point out to me in that walk we took together in Grotewell. He had suffered a great anguish in the flight and degradation of his only daughter, and though the real facts connected with her departure were not known in the village, he was so overcome with shame, and so shattered in health, he lived in the utmost seclusion, opening his doors to but few visitors, among whom I, for some unexplained reason, was one. He used to say he liked me and saw in me the makings of a considerable man; and I, because he was Colonel Japha and a strong spirit, returned his appreciation, and spent many of my bitter and unhappy hours in his presence. It was upon one of these occasions the temptation came to which I have just alluded.

"I had been talking about his health and the advisability of his taking a journey, when he suddenly rose and said, 'Come with me to my study.'

"I of course went. The first thing I saw upon entering was a trunk locked and strapped. 'I am going to Europe to-morrow,' said he, 'to be gone six months.'

"I was astonished, for in that town no one presumed to do anything of importance without consulting his neighbors; but I merely bowed my congratulations, and waited for him to speak, for I saw he had something on his mind that he wished to say. At last it came out. He had a daughter, he said, a daughter who had disgraced him and whom he had forbidden his house. She was not worthy of his consideration, yet he could not help but remember her, and while he never desired to see her enter his doors, it was not his wish that she should suffer want. He had a little money which he had laid by and which he wished to put into my hands for her use, provided anything should happen to him during his absence. 'She is a wanderer now,' he cried, 'but she may one day come back, and then if I am dead and gone, you may give it to her.' I was not to enter it in the bank under his name, but regard it as a personal trust to be used only under such circumstances as he mentioned.

"The joy with which I listened to this proposal amounted almost to ecstacy when he went to his desk and brought out five one thousand dollar bills and laid them in my hand. 'It is not much,' said he, 'but it will save her from worse degradation if she chooses to avail herself of it.'

"Not much; oh no, not much, but just the sum that would raise me out of the pit of despondency into which I had fallen, and give me my bride, a chance in the world, and last, but not least, revenge on the rival I had now learned to hate. I was obliged to give the colonel a paper acknowledging the trust, but that was no hindrance. I did not mean to use the money, only to show it; and long before the colonel could return, my own five thousand would be in my hands – and so, and so, and so, as the devil reasons and young infatuated ears listen.

"Colonel Japha thought I was an honest man, nor did I consider myself otherwise at that time. It was a chance for clever action; a bit of opportune luck that it would be madness to discard. On the day the vessel sailed which carried Colonel Japha out of the country, I went to Mr. Delafield and showed him the five crisp bank notes that represented as it were by proxy, the fortune I so speedily expected to inherit. 'You have wanted to see five thousand dollars in my hand,' said I; 'there they are.'

"His look of amazement was peculiar and ought to have given me warning; but I was blinded by my infatuation and thought it no more than the natural surprise incident to the occasion. 'I have been made to wait a long time for your consent to my suit,' said I; 'may I hope that you will now give me leave to press my claims upon your daughter?'

"He did not answer at once, but smiled, eying meanwhile the notes in my hand with a fascinated gaze which instinctively warned me to return them to my pocket. But I no sooner made a move indicative of that resolve, than he thrust out his cold slim hand and prevented me. 'Let me see them,' cried he.

"There was no reason for me to refuse so simple a request to one in Mr. Delafield's position, and though I had rather he had not asked for the notes, I handed them over. He at once seemed to grow taller. 'So this is your start off in life,' exclaimed he.

"I bowed, and he let his eyes roam for a moment to my face. 'Many a man would be glad of worse,' smiled he; then suavely, 'you shall have my daughter, sir.'

"I must have turned white in my relief, for he threw his head back and laughed in a low unmusical way that at any other time would have affected me unpleasantly. But my only thought then, was to get the money back and rush with my new hopes into the room from which came the low ceaseless hum of his daughter's voice. But at the first movement of my hand towards him, he assumed a mysterious air, and closing his fingers over the notes, said:

"'These are yours, to do what you wish with, I suppose?'

"I may have blushed, but if I did, he took no notice. 'What I wish to do with them,' returned I, 'is to shut them up in the bank for the present, at least till Ona is my wife.'

"'Oh no, no, no, you do not,' came in easy, almost wheedling tones from the man before me. 'You want to put them where they will double themselves in two months.' And before I could realize to what he was tempting me, he had me down before his desk, showing me letters, documents, etc., of a certain scheme into which if a man should put a dollar to-day, it would 'come out three and no mistake, before the year was out. It is a chance in a thousand,' said he; 'if I had half a million I would invest it in this enterprise to-day. If you will listen to me and put your money in there, you will be a rich man before ten years have passed over your head.'

"I was dazzled. I knew enough of such matters to see that it was neither a hoax nor a chimera. He did have a good thing, and if the five thousand dollars had been my own – But I soon came to consider the question without that conditional. He was so specious in his manner of putting the affair before me, so masterful in the way he held on to the money, he gave me no time to think. 'Say the word,' cried he, 'and in two months I bring you back ten thousand for your five. Only two months,' he repeated, and then slowly, 'Ona was born for luxury.'

"Paula, you cannot realize what that temptation was. To amass wealth had never been my ambition before, but now everything seemed to urge it upon me. Dreams of unimagined luxury came to my mind as these words were uttered. A vision of Ona clad in garments worthy of her beauty floated before my eyes; the humble home I had hitherto pictured for myself, broadened and towered away into a palace; I beheld myself honored and accepted as the nabob of the town. I caught a glimpse of a new paradise, and hesitated to shut down the gate upon it. 'I will think of it,' said I, and went into the other room to speak to Ona.

"Ah, if some angel had met me on the threshold! If my mother's spirit or the thought of your dear face could have risen before me then and stopped me! Dizzy, intoxicated with love and ambition, I crossed the room to where she sat reeling off a skein of blue silk with hands that were whiter than alabaster. Kneeling down by her side, I caught those fair hands in mine.

"'Ona,' I cried, 'will you marry me? Your father has given his consent, and we shall be very happy.'

"She bestowed upon me a little pout, and half mockingly, half earnestly inquired, 'What kind of a house are you going to put me in? I cannot live in a cottage.'

"'I will put you in a palace,' I whispered, 'if you will only say that you will be mine.'

"'A palace! Oh, I don't expect palaces; a house like the Japhas' would do. Not but what I should feel at home in a palace,' she added, lifting her lordly head and looking beautiful enough to grace a sceptre. Then, archly for her, 'And papa has given his consent?'

"'Yes,' I ardently cried.

"'Then Dr. Burton might as well go,' she answered. 'I will trust my father's judgment, and take the palace – when it comes.'

"After that, it was impossible to disappoint her.

"Paula, in stating all this, I have purposely confined myself to relating bare facts. You must see us as we were. The glamour which an unreasoning passion casts over even a dishonest act, if performed for the sake of winning a beautiful woman, is no excuse in my own soul for the evil to which I succumbed that day, nor shall it seem so to you. Bare, hard, stern, the fact confronts me from the past, that at the first call of temptation I fell; and with this blot on my character, you will have to consider me – unhappy being that I am!

"I did not realize then, however, all that I had done. The operation entered into by Mr. Delafield prospered, and in two months I had, as he predicted, ten thousand dollars instead of five, in my possession. Besides, I had just married Ona, and for awhile life was a dream of delight and luxury. But there came a day when I awoke to an insight of the peril I had escaped by a mere chance of the die. The money which I had expected from my aunt's will, turned out to be amongst certain funds that had been risked in speculation by some agent during her sickness, and irrecoverably lost. The expression of her good-will was all that ever came to me of the legacy upon which I had so confidently relied.

"I was sitting with my young wife in the pretty parlor of our new home, when the letter came from my lawyer announcing this fact, and I never can make you understand what effect it had upon me. The very walls seemed to shrivel up into the dimensions of a prison's cell; the face that only an hour before had possessed every conceivable charm for me, shone on my changed vision with the allurement, but also with the unreality of a will-o'-the-wisp. All that might have happened if the luck, instead of being in my favor, had turned against me, crushed like a thunderbolt upon my head, and I rose up and left the presence of my young wife, with the knowledge at my heart that I was no more nor less than a thief in the eyes of God, if not in that of my fellow-men; a base thief, who if he did not meet his fit punishment, was only saved from it by fortuitous circumstances and the ignorance of those he had been so near despoiling.

"The bitterness of that hour never passed away. The streets in which I had been raised, the house which had been the scene of my temptation, Mr. Delafield's face, and my own home, all became unendurable to me. I felt as if each man I met must know what I had done; and secret as the transaction had been, it was long before I could enter the bank without a tremor of apprehension lest I should hear from some quarter, that my services there would no longer be required. The only comfort I received was in the thought that Ona did not know at what a cost her hand had been obtained. I was still under the glamour of her languid smiles and countless graces, and was fain to believe that notwithstanding a certain unresponsiveness and coldness in her nature, her love would yet prove a compensation for the remorse that I secretly suffered.

"My distaste for Grotewell culminated. It was too small for me. The money I had acquired through the use of my neighbor's funds burned in my pocket. I determined to move to New York, and with the few thousands I possessed, venture upon other speculations. But this time in all honesty. Yes, I swore it before God and my own soul, that never again would I run a risk similar to that from which I had just escaped. I would profit by the money I had acquired, oh yes, but henceforth all my operations should be legitimate and honorable. My wife, who was fast developing a taste for ease and splendor, seconded my plans with something like fervor, while Mr. Delafield actually went so far as to urge my departure. 'You are bound to make a rich man,' said he 'and must go where great fortunes are to be secured.' He never asked me what became of the five thousand dollars I returned to Colonel Japha upon his arrival from Europe.

"So I came to New York.

"Paula, the man who loses at the outset of a doubtful game, is fortunate. I did not lose, I won. As if in that first dishonest deed of mine I had summoned to my side the aid of evil influences, each and every operation into which I entered prospered. It seemed as if I could not make a mistake; money flowed towards me from all quarters; power followed, and I found myself one of the most successful and one of the most unhappy men in New York. There are some things of which a man cannot write even to the one dear heart he most cherishes and adores. You have lived in my home, and will acquit me from saying much about her who, with all her faults and her omissions, was ever kind to you. But some things I must repeat in order to make intelligible to you the change which gradually took place within me as the years advanced. Beauty, while it wins the lover, can never of itself hold the heart of a husband who possesses aspirations beyond that which passion supplies. Reckless, worldly and narrow-minded as I had been before the commission of that deed which embittered my life, I had become by the very shock that followed the realization of my wrong-doing, a hungry-hearted, eager-minded and melancholy-spirited man, asking but one boon in recompense for my secret remorse, and that was domestic happiness and the sympathetic affection of wife and children. Woman, according to my belief, was born to be chiefly and above all, the consoler. What a man missed in the outside world, he was to find treasured at home. What a man lacked in his own nature, he was to discover in the delicate and sublimated one of his wife. Beautiful dream, which my life was not destined to see realized!

"The birth of my only child was my first great consolation. With the opening of her blue eyes upon my face, a well-spring deep as my unfathomable longing, bubbled up within my breast. Alas, that very consolation brought a hideous grief; the mother did not love her child; and another strand of the regard with which I still endeavored to surround the wife of my youth, parted and floated away out of sight. To take my little one in my arms, to feel her delicate cheek press yearningly to mine, to behold her sweet infantile soul develop itself before my eyes, and yet to realize that that soul would never know the guidance or sympathy of a mother, was to me at once rapture and anguish. I sometimes forgot to follow up a fortunate speculation, in my indulgence of these feelings. I was passionately the father as I might have been passionately the husband and the friend. Geraldine died; how and with what attendant circumstances of pain and regret, I will not, dare not state. The blow struck to the core of my being. I stood shaken before God. The past, with its one grim remembrance – a remembrance that in the tide of business successes and the engrossing affection which had of late absorbed me, had been well-nigh swamped from sight – rose before me like an accusing spirit. I had sinned, and I had been punished; I had sown, and I had reaped.

"More than that, I was sinning still. My very enjoyment of the position I had so doubtfully acquired, was unworthy of me. My very wealth was a disgrace. Had it not all been built upon another man's means? Could the very house I lived in be said to be my own, while a Japha existed in want? In the eyes of the world, perhaps, yes; in my own eyes, no. I became morbid on the subject. I asked myself what I could do to escape the sense of obligation that overwhelmed me. The few sums with which I had been secretly enabled to provide Colonel Japha during the final days of his ruined and impoverished life, were not sufficient. I desired to wipe out the past by some large and munificent return. Had the colonel been living, I should have gone to him, told him my tale and offered him the half of my fortune; but his death cut off all hopes of my righting myself in that way. Only his daughter remained, the poor, lost, reprobated being, whom he was willing to curse, but whom he could not bear to believe suffering. I determined that the debt due to my own peace of mind should be paid to her. But how? Where was I to find this wanderer? How was I to let her know that a comfortable living awaited her if she would only return to her friends and home? Consulting with a business associate, he advised me to advertise. I did so, but without success. I next resorted to the detectives, but all without avail. Jacqueline Japha was not to be found.

"But I did not relinquish my resolve. Deliberately investing a hundred thousand dollars in Government bonds, I put them aside for her. They were to be no longer mine. I gave them to her and to her heirs as completely and irrevocably, I believed, as if I had laid them in her hand and seen her depart with them. I even inserted them as a legacy to her in my will. It was a clear and definite arrangement between me and my own soul; and after I had made it and given orders to my lawyer in Grotewell to acquaint me if he ever received the least news of Jacqueline Japha, I slept in peace.

"Of the years that followed I have small need to speak. They were the years that preceded your coming, my Paula, and their story is best told by what I was when we met again, and you made me know the sweet things of life by entering into my home. Woman as a thoughtful, tender, elevated being had been so long unknown to me! The beauty of the feminine soul with its faith fixed upon high ideals, was one before which I had ever been ready to bow. All that I had missed in my youth, all that had failed me in my maturing manhood, seemed to flow back upon me like a river. I bathed in the sunshine of your pure spirit and imagined that the evil days were over and peace come at last.

"A rude and bitter shock awoke me. Ona's father, who had followed us to New York, and of whose somewhat checkered career during the past few years, I have purposely forborne to speak, had not been above appealing to us for assistance at such times as his frequently unfortunate investments left him in a state of necessity. These appeals were usually made to Ona, and in a quiet way; but one day he met me on the street – it was during the second winter you spent in my home – and dragging me into a restaurant down town, began a long tale, to the effect that he wanted a few thousands from me to put into a certain investment, which if somewhat shady in its character, was very promising as to its results; and gave as a reason why he applied to me for the money, that he knew I had not been above doing a wrongful act once, in order to compass my ends, and therefore would not be liable to hesitate now.

"It was the thunderbolt of my life. My sin was not then buried. It had been known to this man from the start. With an insight for which I had never given him credit, he had read my countenance in the days of my early temptation, and guessed, if he did not know, where the five thousand dollars came from with which I began my career as speculator. Worse than that, he had led me on to the act by which he now sought to hold me. Having been the secret agent in losing my aunt's money, he knew at the time that I was cherishing empty hopes as regarded a legacy from her, yet he let me dally with my expectations, and ensnare myself with his daughter's fascinations, till driven mad by disappointment and longing, I was ready to resort to any means to gain my purpose. It was a frightful revelation to come to me in days when, if I were not a thoroughly honest man, I had at least acquired a deep and ineradicable dread of dishonor. Answering him I know not how, but in a way that while it repudiated his proposition, unfortunately acknowledged the truth of the suppositions upon which it was founded, I left him and went home, a crushed and disheartened man. Life which had been so long in acquiring cheerful hues, was sunk again in darkness; and for days I could not bear the sight of your innocent face, or the sound of your pure voice, or the tokens of your tender and unsuspecting presence in my home. But soon the very natural thought came to comfort me, that the sin I so deplored was as much dead now, as it was before I learned the fact of this man's knowledge of it. That having repented and put it away, I was as free to accept your gentle offices and the regard of all true men, as ever I had been; and beguiled by this plausible consideration, I turned again to my one visible source of consolation, and in the diversion it offered, let the remembrance of this last bitter experience pass slowly from my mind. The fact that Mr. Delafield left town shortly after his interview with me, and smitten by shame perhaps, forbore to acquaint us with his whereabouts or afflict us with his letters, may have aided me in this strange forgetfulness.

"But other and sharper trials were in store; trials that were to test me as a man, and as it proved, find me lacking just where I thought I was strongest. Paula, that saying of the Bible, 'Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall,' might have been written over the door of my house on that day, ten months ago, when we two stood by the hearthstone and talked of the temptations that beset humanity, and the charity we should show to such as succumb to them. Before the day had waned, my own hour had come; and not all the experience of my life, not all the resolves, hopes, fears of my later years, not even the remembrance of your sweet trust and your natural recoil from evil, were sufficient to save me. The blow came so suddenly! the call for action was so peremptory! One moment I stood before the world, rich, powerful, honored, and beloved; the next, I saw myself threatened with a loss that undermined my whole position, and with it the very consideration that made me what I was. But I must explain.

"When I entered the Madison Bank as President, I gave up in deference to the wishes of Mr. Stuyvesant all open speculation in Wall Street. But a wife and home such as I then had, are not to be supported on any petty income; and when shortly after your entrance into my home, the opportunity presented itself of investing in a particularly promising silver mine out West, I could not resist the temptation; regarding the affair as legitimate, and the hazard, if such it were, one that I was amply able to bear. But like most enterprises of the kind, one dollar drew another after it, and I soon found that to make available what I had already invested, I was obliged to add to it more and more of my available funds, until – to make myself as intelligible to you as I can – it had absorbed not only all that had remained to me after my somewhat liberal purchase of the Madison Bank stock, but all I could raise on a pledge of the stock itself. But there was nothing in this to alarm me. I had a man at the mine devoted to my interests; and as the present yield was excellent, and the future of more promise still, I went on my way with no special anxiety. But who can trust a silver mine? At the very point where we expected the greatest result, the vein suddenly gave out, and nothing prevented the stock from falling utterly flat on the market, but the discretion of my agent, who kept the fact a secret, while he quietly went about getting another portion of the mine into working order. He was fast succeeding in this, and affairs were looking daily more promising, when suddenly an intimation received by me in a bit of conversation casually overheard at that reception we attended together, convinced me that the secret was transpiring, and that if great care were not taken, we should be swamped before we could get things into working trim again. Filled with this anxiety, I was about to leave the building, in order to telegraph to my agent, when to my great surprise the card of that very person was brought in to me, together with a request for an immediate interview. You remember it, Paula, and how I went out to see him; but what you did not know then, and what I find some difficulty in relating now, is that his message to me was one of total ruin unless I could manage to give into his hand, for immediate use, the sum of a hundred thousand dollars.

"The facts making this demand necessary were not what you may have been led to expect. They had little or nothing to do with the new operations, which were progressing successfully and with every promise of an immediate return, but arose entirely out of a law-suit then in the hands of a Colorado judge for decision, and which, though it involved well-nigh the whole interest of the mine, had never till this hour given me the least uneasiness, my lawyers having always assured me of my ultimate success. But it seems that notwithstanding all this, the decision was to be rendered in favor of the other party. My agent, who was a man to be trusted in these matters, averred that five days before, he had learned from most authentic sources what the decision was likely to be. That the judge's opinion had been seen – he did not tell me how, he dared not, nor did I presume to question, but I have since learned that not only had the copyist employed by the judge turned traitor, but that my own agent had been anything but scrupulous in the use he had made of a willing and corruptible instrument – and that if I wanted to save myself and the others connected with me from total and irremediable loss, I must compromise with the other parties at once, who not being advised of the true state of affairs, and having but little faith in their own case, had long ago expressed their willingness to accept the sum of a hundred thousand dollars as a final settlement of the controversy. My agent, if none too nice in his ideas of right and wrong, was, as I have intimated, not the man to make a mistake; and when to my question as to how long a time he would give me to look around among my friends and raise the required sum, he replied, 'Ten hours and no more,' I realized my position, and the urgent necessity for immediate action.

"The remainder of the night is a dream to me. There was but one source from which I could hope in the present condition of my affairs, to procure a hundred thousand dollars; and that was from the box where I had stowed away the bonds destined for the use of the Japha heirs. To borrow was impossible, even if I had been in possession of proper securities to give. I was considered as having relinquished speculation and dared not risk the friendship of Mr. Stuyvesant by a public betrayal of my necessity. The Japha bonds or my own fortune must go, and it only remained with me to determine which.

"Paula, nothing but the ingrained principle of a lifetime, the habit of doing the honest thing without thought or hesitation, saves a man at an hour like that. Strong as I believed myself to be in the determination never again to flaw my manhood by the least action unworthy of my position as the guardian of trusts, earnest as I was in my recoil from evil, and sincere as I may have been in my admiration of and desire for the good, I no sooner saw myself tottering between ruin and a compromise with conscience, than I hesitated – hesitated with you under my roof, and with the words we had been speaking still ringing in my ears. Ona's influence, for all the trials of our married life, was still too strong upon me. To think of her as deprived of the splendor which was her life, daunted my very soul. I dared not contemplate a future in which she must stand denuded of everything which made existence dear to her; yet how could I do the evil thing I contemplated, even to save her and preserve my own position! For – and you must understand this – I regarded any appropriation of these funds I had delegated to the use of the Japhas, as a fresh and veritable abuse of trust. They were not mine. I had given them away. Unknown to any one but my own soul and God, I had deeded them to a special purpose, and to risk them as I now proposed doing, was an act that carried me back to the days of my former delinquency, and made the repentance of the last few years the merest mockery. What if I might recover them hereafter and restore them to their place; the chances in favor of their utter loss were also possible, and honesty deals not with chances. I suffered so, I had a momentary temptation towards suicide; but suddenly, in the midst of the struggle, came the thought that perhaps in my estimate of Ona I had committed a gross injustice, that while she loved splendor seemingly more than any woman I had ever known, she might be as far from wishing me to retain her in it at the price of my own self-respect, as the most honest-hearted wife in the world; and struck by the hope, I left my agent at a hotel and hurried home through the early morning to her side. She Was asleep, of course, but I wakened her. It was dark and she had a right to be fretful, but when I whispered in her ear, 'Get up and listen to me, for our fortune is at stake,' she at once rose and having risen, was her clearest, coldest, most implacable self. Paula, I told her my story, my whole story as I have told it to you here. I dropped no thread, I smoothed over no offence. Torturing as it was to my pride, I laid bare my soul before her, and then in a burst of appeal such as I hope never to be obliged to make use of again, asked her as she was a woman and a wife, to save me in this hour of my temptation.

"Paula, she refused. More than that, she expressed the bitterest scorn of my mawkish conscientiousness, as she called it. That I should consider myself as owing anything to the detestable wretch who was the only representative of the Japhas, was bad enough, but that I should go on treasuring the money that would save us, was disgraceful if not worse, and betrayed a weakness of mind for which she had never given me credit.

"'But Ona,' I cried, 'if it is a weakness of mind, it is also an equivalent to my consciousness of right living. Would you have me sacrifice that?'

"'I would have you sacrifice anything necessary to preserve us in our position,' said she; and I stood aghast before an unscrupulousness greater than any I had hitherto been called upon to face.

"'Ona,' repeated I, for her look was cold, 'do you realize what I have been telling you? Most wives would shudder when informed that their husbands had perpetrated a dishonest act in order to win them.'