“A pretty woman, I believe she was, with magnificent black eyes; the most wonderful eyes in the West Country, people said,” Mr. Jetsam proceeded. “Husband dead some little time. Anyhow, she had gone out of mourning, and her dresses were the amazement of the town. They’d look pretty queer nowadays, I reckon, because that was before 1860. However, her dresses have got nothing to do with it, especially as the soda-water manufacturer--have I happened to mention that his name was Ilam?--especially as Mr. Ilam couldn’t see them very well. Mr. Ilam was beginning to suffer from a cataract; both his eyes were affected, and the disease was making progress rapidly. You must remember that oculists didn’t know as much about cataract then as they do now. Well, Mr. Ilam was himself a widower--a widower with one child, aged three years. He had been a widower for two years when he first met Mrs. Kilmarnock. He liked Mrs. Kilmarnock. She seemed to have in her the makings of a good nurse, and one of the things that Mr. Ilam wanted was a faithful, loving nurse. He was certainly in an awkward predicament. He also wanted a mother for his child; and Mrs. Kilmarnock took a tremendous fancy to the child--a simply tremendous fancy. He was a man who talked pretty freely and openly, Mr. Ilam was, and he made no secret of the fact that, though he preferred to marry a widow, he would never permit himself to marry a widow who had children of her own. And one day he said to Mrs. Kilmarnock that, since he had never heard her mention a child, he assumed that she had no children. “She replied that his assumption was correct, and that she continually regretted being childless, as she adored children, and felt very severely the need of something to give her a real interest in life. A month later Mr. Ilam asked Mrs. Kilmarnock to marry him, and she consented like a bird. Three months later they were married. Everybody said kind things; for you must know that Mrs. Kilmarnock was not penniless herself. Oh, no! She lived in very good style in Torquay, and gave dinners that Torquay liked. And Torquay is a good judge of dinners. Her husband had been a Scottish writer to the Signet, she said. So the marriage was celebrated amid universal plaudits, and there was quite three-quarters of a column about it in the _Western Morning News_.” At this juncture Carpentaria ventured to interrupt the speaker. “You appear,” he said, “to be remarkably well informed about matters which occurred long before you were of an age to take an intelligent interest in them. At the time of this marriage you surely were not in the habit of reading newspapers?” “I was not,” answered Jetsam drily. “I had attained the mature age of three years. If I am well informed it is because I have taken the trouble to inform myself. You see, I was interested, and I have spared no pains during this last year or two to acquire all the circumstantial details of the case.”