“Ah,” sighed Mrs. Lascelles, “but that dear boy, who turns out to be a friend of yours, he 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 sentence, I had succeeded in holding my tongue; though she was looking wistfully now at the distant snow-peaks and obviously bestowing upon herself the sympathy she did not want from me (as I had been told in so many words, if not more plainly in the accompanying brief encounter between our eyes), yet had I resisted every temptation to put in my word, until these last two or three from Mrs. Lascelles.  They, however, demanded a denial, and I told her it was absurd to describe herself in such terms.