Page:The New Penelope.djvu/17

Rh "Mr. Greyfield was your second husband?" I said, in an inquiring tone, but without expecting to be contradicted.

"Mr. Greyfield was my first, last, and only husband," she replied, with a touch of asperity, yet not as if she meant it for me.

"I beg your pardon," I hastened to explain: "but I had been told—"

"Yes, I can guess what you have been told. Very few people know the truth: but I never had a second husband, though I was twice married;" and my hostess regarded me with a smile half assumed and half embarrassed.

For my own part, I was very much embarrassed, because I had certainly been informed that she had lived for a number of years with a second husband who had not used her well, and from whom she was finally divorced. Doubt her word I could not; neither could I reconcile her statement with facts apparently well known. She saw my dilemma, and, after a brief silence, mentally decided to help me out of it. I could see that, in the gradual relaxing of certain muscles of her face, which had contracted at the first reference to this—as I could not doubt—painful subject. Straightening her fine form as if ease of position was not compatible with what was in her mind, she grasped the arms of her chair with either hand, and looking with a retrospective gaze into the fire, began:

"You see it was this way: the man I married the second time had another wife."

While she drew a deep breath, and made a momentary pause, I seemed to take it all in, for I had heard so many stories of deserted Eastern homes, and subsequent illegal marriages in California, that I was prepared not to be at all surprised at what I should learn from her. Directly she went on:

"I found out about it the very day of the marriage. We were married in the morning, and in the afternoon a man