the local court
in the most secret manner imaginable. The merest item in three of the
Philadelphia papers some six weeks later reported that a divorce had
been granted. When Mrs. Cowperwood read it she wondered greatly that
so little attention had been attracted by it. She had feared a much
more extended comment. She little knew the cat-like prowlings, legal
and journalistic, of her husband's interesting counsel. When
Cowperwood read it on one of his visits to Chicago he heaved a sigh of
relief. At last it was really true. Now he could make Aileen his
wife. He telegraphed her an enigmatic message of congratulation. When
Aileen read it she thrilled from head to foot. Now, shortly, she would
become the legal bride of Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the newly
enfranchised Chicago financier, and then--

"Oh," she said, in her Philadelphia home, when she read it, "isn't that
splendid! Now I'll be Mrs. Cowperwood. Oh, dear!"

Mrs. Frank Algernon Cowperwood number one, thinking over her husband's
liaison, failure, imprisonment, pyrotechnic operations at the time of
the Jay Cooke failure, and his present financial ascendancy, wondered
at the mystery of life. There must be a God. The Bible said so. Her
husband, evil though he was, could not be utterly bad, for he had made
ample provision for her, and the children liked him. Certainly, at the
time of the criminal prosecution he was no worse than some others who
had gone free. Yet he had been convicted, and she was sorry for that
and had always been. He was an able and ruthless man. She hardly knew
what to think. The one person she really did blame was the wretched,
vain, empty-headed, ungodly Aileen Butler, who had been his seductress
and was probably now to be his wife. God would punish her, no doubt.
He must. So she went to church on Sundays and tried to believe, come
what might, that all was for the best.

Chapter VI

The New Queen of the Home

The day Cowperwood and Aileen were married--it was in an obscure
village called Dalston, near Pittsburg, in western Pennsylvania, where
they had stopped off to manage this matter--he had said to her: "I want
to tell you, dear, that you and I are really beginning life all over.
Now it depends on how well we play this game as to how well we succeed.
If you will listen to me we won't try to do anything much socially in
Chicago for the present. Of course we'll have to meet a few people.
That can't be avoided. Mr