“By Jove! I don’t believe she half liked your leaving--the lovely widow, I mean! (There’s but one _she_ to me now!) And it seems you had crossed on the steamer together without being acquainted! It’s a wonder she even noticed you--but she did--and she asked three or four times where you were gone. I begin to be reconciled to your going back so soon, old man. She takes more interest in you than I exactly fancy.” Hertford let him run on with this flippant sort of talk, for the sake of the information he let drop now and then. He discovered that the haughty individual who acted as her chaperon was in reality a poor relation, dependent on her bounty; though, as Kennedy said, she owed everything to this aunt, who had made this rich match for her, and had married her to a husband who died in a year, leaving her a millionaire. This made Hertford wince with pain. The whole interview was frightfully trying, and he was relieved to be alone at last. He passed a sleepless night, and a restless, impatient morning. In the afternoon he inquired his way to Mrs. Etheridge’s house, and rang the bell, sending in his card for the two ladies. Miss Shelton, it turned out, was not at home, but after a few minutes spent in a magnificent drawing-room, down the long vista of which he could see into other superb apartments beyond, the young widow came to him. Hertford was so entirely sure that they understood each other, that it was all he could do to keep from asking her, then and there, to be his wife. The restrictions of conventionality prevailed, however, and they kept to mere friendly discussion of the events of the voyage, and such things. It was so free and delightful, however, this long talk, that he stayed on and on, and when he rose to go, and she gave him her hand, he dared to hold it a second longer than was necessary, and to feel that the touch conveyed a message to her heart. It is certain that she blushed, as he looked down at her, and that the blush made her a hundred times more bewitching to his heart and senses than before. The magnificence of the grand hall that he crossed in leaving her, and the suggestions of great wealth that he saw on every side, grated upon him, but, as he walked away from her presence, he was too blissfully in love for that to matter much. He felt perfectly certain, in spite of the odious idea suggested by his friend’s coarse way of putting things, that the marriage had been a love-match; for it was absolutely impossible that the divinely good, and sweet, and modest creature from whom he had just parted, ever could have married from any motive but love. He even got up a sort of emotion of pity for the dead man, when he thought of what had been lost to him, and yet he felt any dealing of fate to be merciful, which opened to him the only chance of supreme and ideal happiness, which his life had ever offered.