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 cause she was too attractive to his son. She had been working elsewhere on Dearborn Street for more than a year; her figure had begun to fill out; she had regained strength and was beginning to exhibit the remarkable vigor of body and of mind and of will which so soon afterwards characterized the woman known to the city as Mrs. Oliver Cullen. She had become beautiful indeed with the beauty which made one feel the deepness and dignity of her thought and her character at the same time that her physical contours of feature, of arm and bosom and limb had become pleasing. Even at the time of her marriage when she was still a girl, no one would have described her as merely pretty. She had wonderful hair, chestnut in color, and she had distinct, dark brows—yes, too heavy, perhaps, if they had been above eyes which were only likeable and pretty. But Agnes Cullen's blue eyes required such brows. The lines were gone from about her lips which smiled seldom, indeed, but pleasantly when they did smile and never meaninglessly.

"That girl is unaccountable," friends of the Cullens said upon meeting her. "She is going to do something before she dies. What in the world do you suppose she wants with Oliver?"

"His money, of course," so the obvious and the stupid said.

But the truth was that, if she had wished only money, she might have married a richer man sooner; and the wise ones, if they had not discovered this fact, at least could have suspected it. "She'll make something surprising of Oliver," they said, which implied that so far—in the estimation of his own people—Oliver had made nothing surprising of himself.

His health, of course, was partly responsible; for