Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/157

 to her, it did not matter whether she had a husband or not. . . I noticed that she was “Mrs. Sawyer” now. . . The stories that I met for the next few days were so fantastic that I really think some one must have been deliberately making them up. At one moment the husband was in a home for inebriates, at another he was alive and well with a formidable revolver ready for any one who became too “friendly” with his wife; at another he was supposed to be in prison for actually shooting a man; then she was said to have divorced him, then he was said to have divorced her. Finally I was assured that she had never had a husband and was an adventuress who had come to exploit London. The money, I was told, was a decoy, and in reality there was no money; she had been left a few thousands by some man with whom she had been living; and she was pouring it out right and left in the hope of ensnaring some one else before it was all spent.

I really did not know; what I should be required to believe next. “We must clear this up,” said Will one night when we were all down at the Hall. “Which story in particular,?” I asked.

“All of them,” he answered very decisively; “and at once. I’m not thinking of us, but we