Then, some months later—­for she and Varick were not given to writing to one another when apart, their friendship had never been of that texture—­she had received a sad letter from him saying that his wife was seriously ill.  The letter had implied, too, that he ought to have been told, before the marriage had taken place, that his wife’s family had been one riddled with consumption.  Blanche had written back at once—­by that time she was a good deal nearer home than Portugal, though still abroad—­asking if she could “do anything?” And he had answered that no, there was nothing to be done.  “Poor Milly” had a horror of sanatoriums, so he was going to take her to some quiet place on the south coast.  He had ended his note with the words:  “I do not think it can last long now, and I rather hope it won’t.  It is very painful for her, as well as for me.”  And it had not lasted very long.  Seven weeks later Miss Farrow had read in the first column of the Times the announcement:  “Millicent, only daughter of the late George Fauncey, of Wyndfell Hall, Suffolk, and the beloved wife of Lionel Varick.”

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, and I hope to live there as soon as I can get the people out to whom it is now let.  ’Twon’t be an easy job, for they’re devoted to it.”

Of course he had got them out very soon, for, as Blanche Farrow now reminded herself, Lionel Varick had an extraordinary power of getting his own way, in little and big things alike.