ch scintillated with cutting sarcasms, which were none the less hard
to bear that they pressed home some disagreeable truths to the easy,
careless spendthrift. The rose had lost its dew and was making its thorns
felt.

And so they quarreled through their honeymoon, and Captain Leavenworth was
not sorry when a hasty and unexpected end came to his furlough and he was
ordered off with his ship for an indefinite length of time.

Even then Kate thought to get her will before he left, and held on her
sullen ways and her angry, blameful talk until the last minute, so that he
hurried away without even one good-bye kiss, and with her angry sentences
sounding in his ears.

True, he repented somewhat on board the ship and sent her back more money
than she could reasonably have expected under the circumstances, but he
sent it without one word of gentleness, and Kate's heart was hard toward
her husband.

Then with bitterness and anguish,--that was new and fairly astonishing that
it had come to her who had always had her way,--she sat down to think of
the man she had jilted. He would have been kind to her. He would have
given her all she asked and more. He would even have moved his business to
New York to please her, she felt sure. Why had she been so foolish! And
then, like many another sinner who is made at last to see the error of his
ways, she cast hard thoughts at a Fate which had allowed her to make so
great a mistake, and pitied her poor little self out of all recognition of
the character she had formed.

But she took her money and went to New York, for she felt that there only
could she be at all happy, and have some little taste of the delights of
true living.

She took up her abode with an ancient relative of her own mother's, who
lived in a quiet respectable part of the city, and who was glad to piece
out her small annuity with the modest sum that Kate agreed to pay for her
board.

It was not long before Mistress Kate, with her beautiful face, and the
pretty clothes which she took care to provide at once for herself,
spending lavishly out of the diminishing sum her husband had sent her, and
thinking not of the morrow, nor the day when the board bills would be due,
became well known. The musty little parlor of the ancient relative was
daily filled with visitors, and every evening Kate held court, with the
old aunt nodding in her chair by the fireside.

Neither did the poor old lady have a very easy time of it, in s