Thus far there was quite as much to prove as there was to disprove the correctness of her surmise, and thinking to herself, “I may as well go further now I have commenced with being rude,” she continued, “Pardon me, Mrs. Graham, if I seem inquisitive, but I cannot help feeling interested in one to whom Rose is so greatly attached, and I do not remember that I ever heard any of your history before your husband went to war. I do not even know your maiden name.” Annie’s heart beat almost audibly, and her cheeks were very red, as she replied, “My father was Dr. Howard, and I was Annie Louise Howard. Excuse me, Mrs. Carleton, if I cannot talk much of my girl-life after my parents died. It was not a happy one. I was wholly dependent upon my aunt, who, while giving me every advantage in the way of education, kept before me so constantly the fact that I was an object of charity that it embittered every moment of my life, and when George offered me his love I accepted it gladly, finding in him the only real friend I had known since the day I was an orphan.” Annie was crying now, and excusing herself she left the parlor and repaired to her own room, where her excitement spent itself in tears and sobs as she recalled all the dreadful years when she was subject to the caprices of the most capricious of women, who had attempted to force her into a marriage with a millionnaire of sixty, and had driven her to accept the love which George Graham had offered her. George had _not_ been her equal in an intellectual point of view, and none knew this fact better than Annie herself. But he was the kindest, tenderest of husbands, and she had loved him devotedly for the manly virtues which made him the noble, unselfish man he was. Capt. Carleton and Jimmie both could sympathize with her tastes and inclinations far better than George had done; but never once during her brief married life had she allowed herself to wonder what her lot might have been had it been cast with people like the Carletons. And since her husband’s death anything which looked away from that grave by the churchyard gate seemed so terrible to her that now, as she recalled Mrs. Carleton’s questionings, and guessed what had prompted them, every nerve quivered with pain, which could only be soothed by a visit to George’s grave. There, on the turf which covered him, she had wept out many a grief, and she started for it now, the villagers watching her as she passed their doors, and curiously speculating, as people will, upon the time to come when the long black dress and graceful, girlish form would not be so often seen among the Rockland dead.