een a double wedding, Mrs. Catlin
becoming the wife of a prosperous medical man, while Enid married a young
soldier who had just come in for L4,000, which he and his girl-wife
at once proceeded to spend.

To-day, in spite of herself, her mind went back insistently to her first
marriage--that marriage of which she never spoke, but of which she was
afraid she would have to tell Godfrey Radmore some day. She was shrewd
enough to know that many a man in love with a widow would be surprised
and taken aback were he suddenly told that she had been married before,
not once, but twice.

Unknowingly to them both, the young, generous, devoted, lover-husband, to
whom even now she sometimes threw a retrospective, kindly thought, had
done her an irreparable injury. He had opened to her the gates of a
material paradise--the kind of paradise in which a young woman enjoys a
constant flow of ready money. Though she was quite unaware of it, it was
those fifteen weeks spent on the Riviera, for the most part at Monte
Carlo, which had gradually caused Enid to argue herself into the belief
that she was justified in doing anything--_anything_ which might
contribute to the renewal of that delicious kind of existence--the only
life, from her point of view, worth living.

Her first husband's death in a motor accident had left her practically
penniless, as well as frightened and bewildered, and so she had committed
the mistake of marrying, almost at once, clever, saturnine Colonel
Crofton, a man over thirty years older than herself. His mad passion had
died down like a straw-fed flame, and when there had come, like a bolt
from their already grey sky, the outbreak of War, it had been a godsend
to them both.

Colonel Crofton had at once stepped into what had seemed to them both
a good income, with all sorts of delightful extras, and allowances,
attached to it. And while he was in France, at the back of the Front,
absorbed in his job, though resentful of the fact that he was not in
the trenches, Enid had shared a small flat in London with another young
and lonely wife. The two had enjoyed every moment of war-time London,
dancing, flirting, taking part, by way of doing their bit, in every
form of the lighter kind of war charities, their ideal existence only
broken by the occasional boredom of having to entertain their respective
husbands when the latter were home on leave.

Then had come the short interval in Egypt during which the Croftons had