I looked so interested and so eager that he did not wait for my reply. “I must try and put it all clearly before you,” he said; “I was interested in it all from the beginning, and from the numerous wild stories afloat I have sifted only what was undeniably true. Some points of the case are still in dispute, and will, perhaps, now for ever remain a mystery. But I must take you back some five-and-twenty years. The Hon. Arthur Le Cheminant, second son of the late Earl of Tremarn, was then travelling round the world for health and pleasure. “In the course of his wanderings he touched at Martinique, one of the French West Indian islands, which was devastated by volcanic eruptions about two years ago. There he met and fell in love with a beautiful half-caste girl named Lucie Legrand, who had French blood in her veins, and was a Christian, but who, otherwise, was only partially civilised, and not at all educated. “How it all came about it is difficult to conjecture, but one thing is absolutely certain, and that is that the Hon. Arthur le Cheminant the son of one of our English Peers, married this half-caste girl at the parish church of St. Pierre, in Martinique, according to the forms prescribed by French laws, both parties being of the same religion. “I suppose now no one will ever know whether that marriage was absolutely and undisputably a legal one—but, in view of subsequent events, we must presume that it was. The Hon. Arthur, however, in any case, behaved like a young scoundrel. He only spent a very little time with his wife, quickly tired of her, and within two years of his marriage callously abandoned her and his child, then a boy about a year old. “He lodged a sum of £2,000 in the local bank in the name of Mme. Le Cheminant, the interest of which was to be paid to her regularly for the maintenance of herself and child, then he calmly sailed for England, with the intention never to return. This intention fate itself helped him to carry out, for he died very shortly afterwards, taking the secret of his incongruous marriage with him to his grave. “Mme. Le Cheminant, as she was called out there, seems to have accepted her own fate with perfect equanimity. She had never known anything about her husband’s social position in his own country, and he had left her what, in Martinique amongst the coloured population, was considered a very fair competence for herself and child. “The grandson of an English earl was taught to read and write by the worthy _curé_ of St. Pierre, and during the whole of her life, Lucie never once tried to find out who her husband was, and what had become of him.