Janet might be a widow, for aught I knew. She was always Janet to me; but why at liberty? why many months at Sarkeld, the guest of the princess? Was she neither maid nor widow--a wife flown from a brutal husband? or separated, and forcibly free? Under such conditions Ottilia would not have commanded my return but what was I to imagine? A boiling couple of hours divided me from the time for dressing, when, as I meditated, I could put a chance question or two to the man commissioned to wait on me, and hear whether the English lady was a Fraulein. The Margravine and Prince Ernest were absent. Hermann worked in his museum, displaying his treasures to Colonel Heddon. I sat with the ladies in the airy look-out tower of the lake-palace, a prey to intense speculations, which devoured themselves and changed from fire to smoke, while I recounted the adventures of our ship's voyage, and they behaved as if there were nothing to tell me in turn, each a sphinx holding the secret I thirsted for. I should not certainly have thirsted much if Janet had met me as far half-way as a delicate woman may advance. The mystery lay in her evident affection, her apparent freedom and unfathomable reserve, and her desire that I should see Temple before she threw off her feminine armour, to which, judging by the indications, Ottilia seemed to me to accede. My old friend was spied first by his sweetheart Lucy, winding dilatorily over the hill away from Sarkeld, in one of the carriages sent to meet him. He was guilty of wasting a prodigious number of minutes with his trumpery 'How d' ye do's,' and his glances and excuses, and then I had him up in my room, and the tale was told; it was not Temple's fault if he did not begin straightforwardly. I plucked him from his narrator's vexatious and inevitable commencement: 'Temple, tell me, did she go to the altar?' He answered 'Yes!' 'She did? Then she's a widow?' 'No, she isn't,' said Temple, distracting me by submitting to the lead I distracted him by taking. 'Then her husband's alive?' Temple denied it, and a devil seized him to perceive some comicality in the dialogue. 'Was she married?' Temple said 'No,' with a lurking drollery about his lips. He added, 'It 's nothing to laugh over, Richie.' 'Am I laughing? Speak out. Did Edbury come to grief overnight in any way?' Again Temple pronounced a negative, this time wilfully enigmatical: he confessed it, and accused me of the provocation. He dashed some laughter with gravity to prepare for my next assault. 'Was Edbury the one to throw up the marriage? Did he decline it?' 'No,' was the answer once more. Temple stopped my wrath by catching at me and begging me to listen. 'Edbury was drowned, Richie.' 'Overnight?'