York
that were utterly in defiance of the most rigid convention.
Particularly was her power felt in the narrow circle over which Mrs.
J. Wilton Ames presided, by reason of her own and her husband's
aristocratic descent, and the latter's bursting coffers and supremacy
in the realm of finance.

Only for her sagacity, the great influence of the woman would have
been short-lived. But, whatever else might be said of her, the
Beaubien was wise, with a discretion that was positively uncanny.
Tall, voluptuous, yet graceful as a fawn; black, wavy, abundant hair;
eyes whose dark, liquid depths held unfathomable mysteries; gracious,
affable, yet keen as a razor blade; tender, even sentimental on
occasions, with an infinite capacity for either love or hate, this
many-sided woman, whose brilliant flashes of wit kept the savant or
roue at her table in an uproar, could, if occasion required, found an
orphanage or drop a bichloride tablet in the glass of her rival with
the same measure of calculating precision and disdain of the future.
It was said of her that she might have laid down her life for the man
she loved. It is probable that she never met with one worth the
sacrifice.

While yet in short dresses she had fled from her boarding school, near
a fashionable resort in the New Hampshire hills, with a French
Colonel, Gaspard de Beaubien, a man twice her age. With him she had
spent eight increasingly miserable years in Paris. Then, her withered
romance carefully entombed in the secret places of her heart, she
secured a divorce from the roistering colonel, together with a small
settlement, and set sail for New York to hunt for larger and more
valuable game.

With abundant charms and sang-froid for her capital, she rented an
expensive apartment in a fashionable quarter of the city, and then
settled down to business. Whether she would have fallen upon bad days
or not will never be known, for the first haul of her widespread net
landed a fish of supreme quality, J. Wilton Ames. On the plea of
financial necessity, she had gone boldly to his office with the deed
to a parcel of worthless land out on the moist sands of the New Jersey
shore, which the unscrupulous Gaspard de Beaubien had settled upon her
when she severed the tie which bound them, and which, after weeks of
careful research, she discovered adjoined a tract owned by Ames.
Pushing aside office boy, clerk, and guard, she reached the inner
_sanctum_ of the astonished financie