Where abler men failed, John Vane was swept into complete disaster. In a transient panic, he was caught long of a big line of stocks, tried to average too soon, and was finally forced to let go his holdings at about the bottom of the market.

It was ruin, absolute and utter; but Helen almost welcomed it, in the belief that the spur of a necessity he had never known before would goad him to the achievement of better things. But the character of John Vane was not the stuff whereof is made the moral phœnix. He shrivelled before the fire of defeat, and sank hopelessly into the ashes of surrender.

They moved from their luxurious apartment to a cheap hotel, thence to a cheaper one, thence to a boarding-house. The backward path was strewn[7] with unsettled bills, and loans never to be repaid. Vane wrote spasmodically for the daily papers, and for such of the magazines as would still accept his work, and, on the pittance thus earned, and the generosity of Helen's father, they contrived to exist, in a fashion, for something over two years.

[7]

But, given the temperament of John Vane, the next development was inevitable. At first Helen sturdily refused to believe that a new demon had entered the hell which he was making of her life. She met him, at night, with an attempt at a smile, deliberately ignoring his unsteady gait, his sodden face, his hot, rank breath. But the evidence was plain, constant, incontestable. Drink had gripped him, and she knew too well that whatever of weakness laid hand upon her husband never relinquished hold.

So another year went by, the gulf between them widening and widening. Finally, he struck her—and then, or the first time, that final degradation, that ominous, unknowable end of hope and self-respect, loomed, hideous and shadowy, through the fog before her. Unable to interpret its significance, she told herself, nevertheless, that it was very near.

They were living in Kingsbridge, in a little frame house into which a man who had known her husband in his Wall Street days had come, in settlement of a bad debt, and which he had offered them, for charity's sake, at a paltry annual rental. The same Samaritan had given Vane a small position in his office, and the[8] latter now went to and fro, between the city and its gruesome little neighbour on the Harlem, taking leave of his wife with a curt, contemptuous nod, and returning, bloated and foul-breathed, to pass the evenings in a semi-stupor.

[8]

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