“----when he met Mary Pinder, who was then a very beautiful girl of seventeen or eighteen, he should fall in love with her. He did not reveal his identity. He had a craze for walking tours, and at that time was travelling through Hereford--not under his own name, which was Viscount Craman, but under the name of Pinder, which was his mother’s maiden name. He met the girl several times without telling her who he was, and married her by special licence, in the name of Pinder, intending to reveal his status after the marriage. They had been living together for a month, when he was suddenly called home by the illness of his father, and arrived in Scotland to find the late Earl dying of malignant scarlet fever. By a cruel fate, William was infected with the disease and died two days after his father, leaving his widow, ignorant alike of his identity and where he was staying. “As he was dying, he told his stepmother, the present Lady Moron, the story of his marriage, and begged her to send for his wife. This she refrained from doing, especially when she learnt that the girl did not know where or who he was. Lord Moron, as of course he was then, was buried. Some time after the countess went to Hereford to seek out the widow. Mrs. Pinder was living in the house of an eccentric woman, a drug-taker and slightly mad. The woman had threatened to commit suicide many times, and it happened that on the morning her ladyship arrived in Hereford and made a call at the house to satisfy her curiosity about her stepson’s wife, the landlady took the fatal step, and when the caller walked into her room, she found her dead, with a letter on the table announcing why she had committed suicide. “Lady Moron is a woman of infinite resource. Here, she thought, was an opportunity of removing for ever a possible claimant to the Moron estate. On the table were a number of jewels and some money, which the woman had put there in her madness. Gathering these, her ladyship went into the girl’s room. She guessed it was hers when she saw the photograph of William on the mantelpiece, a photograph which was afterwards left in Lois’ room to discover if she knew her father. Lady Moron placed the jewels and the poison in an open box, locked it, taking away the key, and also a letter which would not only have established Mrs. Pinder’s innocence, but if the part Lady Moron played became public property, would also establish hers! That is the explanation for what would seem at the most to be an indiscretion.