sensation of two continents. All Society had attended the gorgeous
wedding, an archbishop had performed the ceremony, and the
newspapers had devoted pages to describing the gowns and the jewels
and the presents and all the rest of the magnificence. And the Count
was a wretched little degenerate, who beat and kicked his wife, and
flaunted his mistresses in her face, and wasted fourteen million
dollars of her money in a couple of years. The mind could scarcely
follow the orgies of this half-insane creature--he had spent two
hundred thousand dollars on a banquet, and half as much again for a
tortoise-shell wardrobe in which Louis the Sixteenth had kept his
clothes! He had charged a diamond necklace to his wife, and taken
two of the four rows of diamonds out of it before he presented it to
her! He had paid a hundred thousand dollars a year to a jockey whom
the Parisian populace admired, and a fortune for a palace in Verona,
which he had promptly torn down, for the sake of a few painted
ceilings. The Major told about one outdoor fete, which he had given
upon a sudden whim: ten thousand Venetian lanterns, ten thousand
metres of carpet; three thousand gilded chairs, and two or three
hundred waiters in fancy costumes; two palaces built in a lake, with
sea-horses and dolphins, and half a dozen orchestras, and several
hundred chorus--girls from the Grand Opera! And in between
adventures such as these, he bought a seat in the Chamber of
Deputies, and made speeches and fought duels in defence of the Holy
Catholic Church--and wrote articles for the yellow journals of
America. "And that's the fate of my lost dividends!" growled the
Major.

There were several automobiles to meet the party at the depot, and
they were whirled through a broad avenue up a valley, and past a
little lake, and so to the gates of Castle Havens.