“And so,” Mr. Fall added grimly, “it is. It seems that, on the night I met her at the ball, she had discovered my acquaintance with her dead husband; and it was that fact which had made her so agreeably disposed to allowing me to call on her, for hers was that kind of breeding--rare, I am given to understand, in these days--which is not usually approachable by a slight acquaintance on the telephone. I am quite assured, in spite of her very courteous assertions to the contrary, that we would never have become friends but for my having known her husband; and I, of course, was at first only too pleased to have chanced on a link which gave her a certain degree of pleasure in my person and company--for both, I have since discovered, were at first devoid of any other interest for her. Very early in our friendship I found that she had loved her husband as few men are fortunate enough to be loved; and in this love had been contained a respect which I can only describe as religious. It was not the qualities of his mind, which were gentlemanly but scarcely above the commonplace, but those of his heart, which had held such a high place in her love; and which, now that he was dead, reigned in her mind to the exclusion--I speak literally, Lord Tarlyon--of every other interest and affection. She had not loved him enough, she said. She ought, she insisted, to have recognised more deeply his regard for and constancy to her; and she ought certainly to have insisted on accompanying him to Rome when, perhaps, under her care, he might not have caught that fatal chill. She persuaded herself that she had neglected one whose every thought, whose whole life, was bound up in hers, a great gentleman whose fidelity to her, one of four daughters of an impoverished house, had merited the most utter devotion; and whose memory she couldn’t but hold in the highest esteem, to the exclusion of every petty circumstance which might invade the life of a woman who was still young and, perhaps, not unattractive. Have some brandy.