Like him, I assumed a name, and presented myself as belonging to her own respectable middle class of life.

You are too old a friend to suspect me of vanity if I tell you that she had no objection to me, and no suspicion that I had approached her (personally speaking) under a disguise." "What motive could she possibly have had for refusing you ?" Dick asked.
"A motive associated with her dead husband," Beaucourt answered.

"He had married her--mind, innocently married her--while his first wife was living.

The woman was an inveterate drunkard; they had been separated for years.

Her death had been publicly reported in the newspapers, among the persons killed in a railway accident abroad.