In regard to visits from the various members of his family—­his mother and father, his brother, his wife, and his sister—­Cowperwood made it plain to them on one of the days on which he was out attending a bankruptcy hearing, that even providing it could be arranged he did not think they should come oftener than once in three months, unless he wrote them or sent word by Steger.  The truth was that he really did not care to see much of any of them at present.  He was sick of the whole social scheme of things.  In fact he wanted to be rid of the turmoil he had been in, seeing it had proved so useless.  He had used nearly fifteen thousand dollars thus far in defending himself—­court costs, family maintenance, Steger, etc.; but he did not mind that.  He expected to make some little money working through Wingate.  His family were not utterly without funds, sufficient to live on in a small way.  He had advised them to remove into houses more in keeping with their reduced circumstances, which they had done—­his mother and father and brothers and sister to a three-story brick house of about the caliber of the old Buttonwood Street house, and his wife to a smaller, less expensive two-story one on North Twenty-first Street, near the penitentiary, a portion of the money saved out of the thirty-five thousand dollars extracted from Stener under false pretenses aiding to sustain it.  Of course all this was a terrible descent from the Girard Avenue mansion for the elder Cowperwood; for here was none of the furniture which characterized the other somewhat gorgeous domicile—­merely store-bought, ready-made furniture, and neat but cheap hangings and fixtures generally.  The assignees, to whom all Cowperwood’s personal property belonged, and to whom Cowperwood, the elder, had surrendered all his holdings, would not permit anything of importance to be removed.  It had all to be sold for the benefit of creditors.  A few very small things, but only a few, had been kept, as everything had been inventoried some time before.  One of the things which old Cowperwood wanted was his own desk which Frank had had designed for him; but as it was valued at five hundred dollars and could not be relinquished by the sheriff except on payment of that sum, or by auction, and as Henry Cowperwood had no such sum to spare, he had to let the desk go.  There were many things they all wanted, and Anna Adelaide had literally purloined a few though she did not admit the fact to her parents until long afterward.

There came a day when the two houses in Girard Avenue were the scene of a sheriffs sale, during which the general public, without let or hindrance, was permitted to tramp through the rooms and examine the pictures, statuary, and objects of art generally, which were auctioned off to the highest bidder.  Considerable fame had attached to Cowperwood’s activities in this field, owing in the first place to the real merit of what he had brought together, and in the next