“All gone by the board, a regular crash, and nothing left to tell the tale.”

“A clear, out and out failure.”

“And all come from signing for that rascally Sanderson.”

“I knew he was a slippery rogue.”

“Good enough for Graystone.”

“Served him right for being such a fool.”

These, and similar uncomplimentary epithets, indiscriminately applied by the assembled ladies, proved what a choice morsel this was considered that had so unexpectedly fallen to their share.

“What will become of the family, I wonder?” queried Mrs. Crane.  “It was bad enough to lose the money, but now that Graystone’s gone, I do not see what them two helpless women are going to do?”

“Live on their connections, most likely,” snapped little Mrs. Brown, “of course they won’t work.”

“No, I do not believe that,” was the reply.  “They are too independent.  At present, I believe, they have taken rooms in an obscure part of the city.  I guess they do not know what to do themselves.”

“It must have been hard to part with everything that was dear to them by association, for I hear that they gave up everything, even Clemence’s piano, to pay debts.”

There was a pitying tone in the speaker’s voice.  Alicia Linden, for all her tragic accents, her deep-set eyes, with their beetling brows, and her generally almost repulsive exterior, had more real heart than any of the women present.  Perhaps she remembered that time in the vanished past, when she had stood by the coffin that contained the loved of her youth, he who had made her girlhood one dream of happiness, but over whose calm face the grass had greened and faded for many a weary year; perhaps this remembrance touched a chord of her better nature.  Life, with its cares, and sorrows, and disappointments, had hardened her, till she had almost lost faith in humanity.  Moreover, she was a woman, homely, and old and common, and with feminine malice and spite she could not readily forgive another of her own sex for being beautiful, refined and attractive.  She said emphatically, that “it was well that, in this world, pride could sometimes be humbled;” but for all that, the memory of that day so long ago, passed alone in her desolation and sorrowful widowhood, lent a pitying sadness to her voice that placed her infinitely above these other soulless ones of her sex, with their cold eyes and unsympathetic tones.

Vixenish Mrs. Brown detected the weakness at once, and pounced upon it with avidity.  She was blessed with a good memory, and one or two well remembered slights from the unconscious objects of her animadversions, rankled bitterly, and she hungered for revenge.  She exulted now without stint, and took no pains to conceal it.  The lady had a blooming daughter, Melinda.  If the mother’s early life had been one of privation and toil, the young lady in question had had, thus far, a totally different experience.