She had been surprised at the addition of the word "beloved." Somehow it
was not like the man she thought she knew so well to put that word in.

That was just over a year ago. But when she had met Varick again she had
seen with real relief that he was quite unchanged--those brief months of
wedded life had not apparently altered him at all. There was, however,
one great difference--he was quite at ease about money. That was
all--but that was a great deal! Blanche Farrow and Lionel Varick had at
any rate one thing in common--they both felt a horror of poverty, and
all that poverty implies.

Gradually Miss Farrow had discovered a few particulars about her
friend's dead wife. Millicent Fauncey had been the only child of a
rather eccentric Suffolk squire, a man of great taste, known in the art
world of London as a collector of fine Jacobean furniture, long before
Jacobean furniture had become the rage. After her father's death his
daughter, having let Wyndfell Hall, had wandered about the world with a
companion till she had drifted across her future husband's path at an
hotel in Florence.

"What attracted me," Lionel Varick had explained rather awkwardly on the
only occasion when he had really talked of his late wife to Blanche
Farrow, "was her helplessness, and, yes, a kind of simplicity."

Blanche had looked at him a little sharply. She had never known Lionel
attracted by weakness or simplicity before. All women seemed attracted
by him--but he was by no means attracted by all women.

"Poor Milly didn't care for Wyndfell Hall," he had gone on, "for she
spent a very lonely, dull girlhood there. But it's a delightful place,