“The beginning,” she said, “was before I began to remember. David and I were playmates before we could talk. Boy and girl, lad and lass, we always belonged to each other, there was no lovemaking between us, I think, for it was all love-living. I do not believe he ever asked me to marry him or promised to marry me, or so much as talked marriage. But we had a clear understanding that we were to marry as soon as we could, at the earliest possible day. He did not merely seem wrapped up in me, he was. God knows he was all my life. Then he had no more than seen Marian Conway when he fell in love with her. There is no use in dwelling on what I suffered. He married almost at once and I gave myself up to that empty life of frivolity which made me a reigning beauty and brought me scores of suitors for none of whom I cared anything and which gave me not a particle of satisfaction. Then after they had lost both their children Marian died. David was frightfully overcome by his loss. He had loved her inconceivably and he showed his grief in the most heart-rending ways. He had the coffin opened over and over after it had been closed. He had it even lifted out of the grave and opened yet once more for one more look at her face. He spent every moment from her death to her burial in a sort of adoration of her corpse, and he did stranger things. I do not know whether it was Mr. Llewellyn’s valet who told, but at any rate the story got out among the servants. The night before she was buried he had her laid out in her coffin and a second coffin exactly like it set beside hers. He stayed locked in the room all night. They believed he lay in the other coffin. At any rate in the morning it was closed, and he did not allow it to be opened. What he had placed in it no one knew. They said it was as heavy as the other. Two hearses, one behind the other, carried the coffins to the graveyard. Her grave is not under the monument--you have seen the monument?” “No,” he said, “only a picture of it.” “Well, she is not buried under it, and the second coffin was placed on hers.” She stopped. “Go on,” he said. “Oh,” she cried, “it is so hard to go on. But it is true. As soon as David was free I felt I had an object in life. I--I followed him, I might almost say pursued him all over the world, and when we met I courted him, and it seems strange, but I asked him to marry me. And--” she hesitated--“he refused twice.” “He did not want to marry you?” Vargas asked incredulously.