The Misleading Widow

In a salt-stung hamlet where whispers travel faster than gulls, Betty Taradine—part Bacchante, part bankrupt—opens her crumbling manse to a war-battered Colonel, igniting tongues that have nothing better to burn. A bank clerk, half vulture, half accountant, hints that the only asset left is her absent husband’s death-promise on parchment; Betty, with the audacity of a tragedienne, forges fate by telegram. Enter Captain Peter Rymill—trim uniform, trembling heart—who is, in the cosmos’s private jest, the very spouse she has declared extinct. Between candle-flirtations and piano-wire tensions, Betty parades before the Colonel to sting her incognito husband, while the Colonel pines for Penelope Moon, a sylph in lace who reads Latin for pleasure. Midnight becomes farce: a portrait-theft, two men squeezed like guilty sardines into chiffonier and bed-frame, a cleric and his vinegary sister barging in like moral weather. When every curtain is drawn, masks drop faster than autumn leaves; declarations spill; matrimonial constellations realign; the widow, misleading no more, steps into dawn arm-in-arm with the man she never truly lost.