A dream life, gone in flames, and a couple charged with arson.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

PHILADELPHIA _ After their $500,000 Bucks County home burned to the ground one winter night in 1995, it did not take long for James and Barbara Saracino to settle back down to the good life, this time just outside the old-money borough of Yardley.

James Saracino, 47, was an insurance agent for State Farm Insurance Cos., just like his father and a brother. Barbara Saracino, 44, was a family physician with a devoted clientele. Just three months after their two-story, brick-veneer Colonial in Northampton was destroyed, they bought a $750,000 nouveau French chateau in flamingo-pink stucco for themselves and their two curly-haired young daughters.

But that good life was poisoned, prosecutors say, by dread that police would uncover the real cause of their cataclysmal house fire.

On Feb. 15, U.S. marshals arrested the couple, saying they had hired a handyman to set the blaze as part of a $1.1 million insurance fraud scheme, which would be one of the most ambitious arson-for-profit schemes in Pennsylvania in decades.

The only hint of a motive given by prosecutors, after a three-year grand-jury investigation, was that Barbara Saracino was simply "dissatisfied with the house and felt it was of poor construction."

But friends and colleagues wonder how the Saracinos _ who already had a life that many Americans only dream of _ could throw it all away.

"Why would they do this?" asked Diana Larsen, a client of James Saracino's Doylestown insurance business and a family friend.