The vast wealth […] was in three years dissipated.

a lucky hour

Every such idiom is what is known as a truth function, and is characterized by the fact that the truth or falsehood of the complex statement which it generates is uniquely determined by the truth or falsehood of the several statements which it combines.

'[A]nd in one manuscript this very Dracula is spoken of as wampyr, which we all understood too well.'