lf by the other young
woman looked musingly at her. "What a lonely creature you are," she
presently said; "never knowing what's going on, or what people are
talking about everywhere with keen interest. You should get out, and
gossip about as other women do, and then you wouldn't be obliged to ask
me a question of that kind. Well, now, I have something to tell you."

Elizabeth-Jane said she was so glad, and made herself receptive.

"I must go rather a long way back," said Lucetta, the difficulty of
explaining herself satisfactorily to the pondering one beside her
growing more apparent at each syllable. "You remember that trying case
of conscience I told you of some time ago--about the first lover and the
second lover?" She let out in jerky phrases a leading word or two of the
story she had told.

"O yes--I remember the story of YOUR FRIEND," said Elizabeth drily,
regarding the irises of Lucetta's eyes as though to catch their exact
shade. "The two lovers--the old one and the new: how she wanted to marry
the second, but felt she ought to marry the first; so that she neglected
the better course to follow the evil, like the poet Ovid I've just been
construing: 'Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.'"

"O no; she didn't follow evil exactly!" said Lucetta hastily.

"But you said that she--or as I may say you"--answered Elizabeth,
dropping the mask, "were in honour and conscience bound to marry the
first?"

Lucetta's blush at being seen through came and went again before
she replied anxiously, "You will never breathe this, will you,
Elizabeth-Jane?"

"Certainly not, if you say not.

"Then I will tell you that the case is more complicated--worse, in
fact--than it seemed in my story. I and the first man were thrown
together in a strange way, and felt that we ought to be united, as the
world had talked of us. He was a widower, as he supposed. He had not
heard of his first wife for many years. But the wife returned, and
we parted. She is now dead, and the husband comes paying me addresses
again, saying, 'Now we'll complete our purposes.' But, Elizabeth-Jane,
all this amounts to a new courtship of me by him; I was absolved from
all vows by the return of the other woman."

"Have you not lately renewed your promise?" said the younger with quiet
surmise. She had divined Man Number One.

"That was wrung from me by a threat."

"Yes, it was. But I think when any one gets coupled up with a man in the
past so unfortunatel