Then something which they regarded as most romantic occurred.

On the day Enid was eighteen, and her mother thirty-seven, there had been 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.