To her troubled surprise there was real pain in the eyes which he turned rather helplessly away from her.  Had she kept her own gaze fixed on them, she would have experienced a second surprise a moment later, at a sudden alteration and hardening of their expression.  For his groping regard had fallen upon her left hand, which was gloved.  Now, a wedding ring may be put on and off at will, but the glove, beneath which it has been once worn, never thereafter quite regains the maidenly smoothness of the third finger.  The butterfly’s gloves were not new, yet there showed not the faintest trace of a ridge in the significant locality.  While admitting to himself that the evidence fell short of conclusiveness, the young man decided to accept it as a working theory and to act, win or lose, do or die, upon the hopeful hypothesis that his delightful but elusive companion was a li—­that is to say, an inventor.  He would give that invention the run of its young life!

“We—­ell,” the Mordaunt Estate was saying, “that’s too bad.  Ain’t a widdah lady are you?”

“My husband is in France.”

With a prayer that his theory was correct, the young man rushed in where many an angel might have feared to tread.  “Maybe he’ll stay there,” he surmised.

“What!”

In a musical but unappreciated barytone he hummed the initial line of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

  “‘The maids of France are fond and free.’

“Besides,” he added, “it’s quite unhealthy there at this season.  I wouldn’t be surprised”—­he halted—­“at anything,” he finished darkly.

Outraged by this ruthless if hypothetical murder of an equally hypothetical spouse, she groped vainly for adequate words.  Before she could find them—­

“I’ll wait around—­in hopes,” he decided calmly.

So, that was the attitude this ruffian took with a respectable and ostensibly married woman!  And she had mistaken him for a gentleman!  She had even begun to feel a reluctant sort of liking for him; at any rate, an interest in his ambiguous and perplexing personality.  Now—­how dared he!  She put it to him at once:  “How dare you!”

“Flashing eye, stamp of the foot, hands outstretched in gesture of loathing and repulsion; villain registers shame and remorse,” prescribed the unimpressed subject of her retort.  “As a wife, you are, of course, unapproachable.  As a widow, grass-green, crepe-black, or only prospective”—­he suddenly assumed a posture made familiar through the public prints by a widely self-exploited savior of the suffering—­“there is H-O-P-E!” he intoned solemnly, wagging a benignant forefinger at her.

The butterfly struggled with an agonizing desire to break down into unbridled mirth and confess.  Pride restrained her; pride mingled with foreboding as to what this exceedingly progressive and by no means unattractive young suitor—­for he could be relegated to no lesser category—­might do next.  She said coolly and crisply: