It was only about a boy and a girl who had run away and married because they happened to be in love, although their parents had prepared other plans for their separate disposal.  The column was a full one, the heading in big type—­a good deal of pother about a boy and a girl, after all, particularly as it appeared that their respective families had determined to make the best of it.  Besides, the girl’s parents had other daughters growing up; and the prettiest of American 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.