mother's thoughts, as only sons are sure to be.

"Benton is just like his father," she said. "He is self-possessed and
full of expedients, but he says very little. I have often wished he
conversed more readily, for I admire a good talker."

"And yet did not marry one:--the common lot!"

Mrs. Greyfield smiled, and gazed into the fire, whose pleasant radiance
filled the room, bringing out the soft warm colors in the carpet, and
making fantastic shadows of our easy-chairs and ourselves upon the wall.

"Mr. Greyfield was your second husband?" I said, in an inquiring tone,
but without expecting to be contradicted.

"Mr. Greyfield was my first, last, and only husband," she replied, with
a touch of asperity, yet not as if she meant it for me.

"I beg your pardon," I hastened to explain: "but I had been told--"

"Yes, I can guess what you have been told. Very few people know the
truth: but I never had a second husband, though I was twice married;"
and my hostess regarded me with a smile half assumed and half
embarrassed.

For my own part, I was very much embarrassed, because I had certainly
been informed that she had lived for a number of years with a second
husband who had not used her well, and from whom she was finally
divorced. Doubt her word I could not; neither could I reconcile her
statement with facts apparently well known. She saw my dilemma, and,
after a brief silence, mentally decided to help me out of it. I could
see that, in the gradual relaxing of certain muscles of her face, which
had contracted at the first reference to this--as I could not
doubt--painful subject. Straightening her fine form as if ease of
position was not compatible with what was in her mind, she grasped the
arms of her chair with either hand, and looking with a retrospective
gaze into the fire, began:

"You see it was this way: the man I married the second time had another
wife."

While she drew a deep breath, and made a momentary pause, I seemed to
take it all in, for I had heard so many stories of deserted Eastern
homes, and subsequent illegal marriages in California, that I was
prepared not to be at all surprised at what I should learn from her.
Directly she went on:

"I found out about it the very day of the marriage. We were married in
the morning, and in the afternoon a man came over from Vancouver who
told me that Mr. Seabrook had a wife, and family of children, in a
certain town in Ohio." Another pause followed, while she s