knows less than anybody else! He doesn't even
suspect. It would have hurt me, yes, it would have hurt even me, to be
given away to him! You didn't do it while I was there, and I know you
didn't when I had turned my back."

"Of course you know I didn't," I echoed rather testily as I took out a
cigarette. The case reminded me of the night before. But I did not again
hand it to Mrs. Lascelles.

"Well, then," she continued, "since you didn't give me away, even
without thinking, I want you to know that after all there isn't quite so
much to give away as there might have been. A divorce, of course, is
always a divorce; there is no getting away from that, or from mine. But
I really did marry again. And I really am the widow they think I am."

I looked quickly up at her, in pure pity and compassion for one gone so
far in sorrow and yet such a little way in life. It was a sudden
feeling, an unpremeditated look, but I might as well have spoken aloud.
Mrs. Lascelles read me unerringly, and she shook her head, sadly but
decidedly, while her eyes gazed calmly into mine.

"_It_ was not a happy marriage, either," she said, as impersonally as if
speaking of another woman. "You may think what you like of me for saying
so to a comparative stranger; but I won't have your sympathy on false
pretences, simply because Major Lascelles is dead. Did you ever meet
him, by the way?"

And she mentioned an Indian regiment. But the major and I had never met.

"Well, it was not very happy for either of us. I suppose such marriages
never are. I know they are never supposed to be. Even if the couple are
everything to each other, there is all the world to point his finger,
and all the world's wife to turn her back, and you have to care a good
deal to get over that. But you may have been desperate in the first
instance; you may have said to yourself that the fire couldn't be much
worse than the frying-pan. In that case, of course, you deserve no
sympathy, and nothing is more irritating to me than the sympathy I don't
deserve. It's a matter of temperament; I'm obliged to speak out, even if
it puts people more against me than they were already. No, you needn't
say anything, Captain Clephane; you didn't express your sympathy, I
stopped you in time.... And yet it is rather hard, when one's still
reasonably young, with almost everything before one--to be a marked
woman all one's time!"

Up to her last words, despite an inviting pause after almost every