CHAPTER Fifteen.
About a week later Hiram Wade, Ida's father, brought suit against Vandover to recover twenty-five thousand dollars, claiming that his daughter had killed herself because she had been ruined by him and that he alone was responsible for her suicide.
Vandover had passed this week in an agony of grief over the loss of his art, a grief that seemed even sharper than that which he had felt over the death of his father.

For this last calamity was like the death of a child of his, some dear, sweet child, that might have been his companion throughout all his life.

At times it seemed to him impossible that his art should fail him in this manner, and again and again he would put himself at his easel, only to experience afresh the return of the numbness in his brain, the impotency of his fingers.
He had begun little by little to pick up the course of his life once more, and on a certain Wednesday morning was looking listlessly through the morning paper as he sat in his window-seat.

The room was delightful, flooded with the morning sun, the Assyrian _bas-reliefs_ just touched with a ruddy light, the Renaissance portraits looking down at him through a fine golden haze; a little fire, just enough to blunt the keenness of the early morning air, snapping in the famous tiled and flamboyant stove.

All about the room was a pleasant fragrance of coffee and good tobacco.
Vandover caught sight of the announcement of the suit with a sudden sharp intake of breath that was half gasp, half cry, starting up from the window-seat, reading it over again and again with staring eyes.
It was a very short paragraph, not more than a dozen lines, lost at the bottom of a column, among the cheap advertisements.