"Poor Tal!" mused Miss Vanderwerf. "I'm sure she would have no difficulty in finding another husband to make up for that fearful old Walkenshaw creature. But she's in a very sad position for so young a creature, poor girl." "Ah!" ejaculated Marion, familiar with ladies thus to be commiserated, and remembering his friend's passion for romance, unquenchable by many seriocomic disenchantments, "separated from her husband--that sort of thing! I thought so." "Now, why did you think that, you horrid creature?" asked his hostess eagerly. "Well, now, there's no saying that you're not _real_ psychological, Jervase. Now _do_ tell what made you think of such a thing." "I don't know, I'm sure," answered Marion, suppressing a yawn. He hated people who pried into his novelist consciousness, all the more so that he couldn't in the least explain its contents. "Something about her--or nothing about her--a mere guess, a stupid random shot that happens to have hit right." "Why, that's just the thing, that you haven't hit quite right. That is, it's right in one way, and wrong in another. Oh, my! how difficult it is just to explain, when one isn't a clever creature like you? Well, Lady Tal isn't separated from her husband, but it's just the same as if she were----" "I see. Mad? Poor thing!" exclaimed Marion with that air of concern which always left you in doubt whether it was utterly conventional, or might not contain a grain of sympathy after all. "No, he's not mad. He's dead--been dead ever so long. She's one and thirty, you know--doesn't look it, does she?--and was married at eighteen. But she can't marry again, for all that, because if she marries all his money goes elsewhere, and she's not a penny to bless herself with." "Ah--and why didn't she have proper settlements made?" asked Marion. "That's just it. Because old Walkenshaw, who was a beast--just a beast--had a prejudice against settlements, and said he'd do much better for his wife than that--leave her everything, if only they didn't plague him. And then, when the old wretch died, after they'd been married a year or so, it turned out that he had left her everything, but only on condition of her not marrying again. If she did, it would all go to the next of kin. He hated the next of kin, too, they say, and wanted to keep the money away from him as long as possible, horrid old wretch! So there poor Tal is a widow, but unable to marry again."