"You told me she'd had three husbands." He was once more puzzled and uncertain of his ground. "You as good as said that she wouldn't be averse to making a fourth of Adair. I therefore conjectured——"
"You conjectured all wrong," she cut him short. "They died for their country."
"All of them?" He was making a rapid calculation as to how long could have elapsed between each re-marriage.
"One at a time, of course," she added. "She
was married to the first the first week of the war."
"Even so it was quick work. May I light a cigarette? Three husbands in four years! She must be a very alluring person!"
Terry laughed nervously. "She is, though you mayn't think it. I can see you don't; you think she's horrid. But let me tell you it takes a smart woman to bring three men to the point of matrimony when the world's so full of unmarried girls. And they were every one of them more or less famous—the kind of men of whom any woman would be proud. You'll remember Pollock—Reggie Pollock; he was one of the earliest of our aces—the man who brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and got killed himself a few days later, no one quite knew how. There was a mystery about his death. He was the man to whom she was first married."
"A splendid chap! And I recall her now. Her portrait was in the illustrated papers at the time of her third marriage. It was headed A Conscientious War-Worker or something like that. And I don't forget the name the soldiers called her when they read the papers in the trenches."
"Did they call her something?" She was gazing at him intently. "Was it something brutal that you wouldn't like to tell me?"
"It was something true," he said, pinching out his cigarette with quiet fierceness.