I gather Lionel's mother was clever, proud, and quarrelsome.

At any rate, she quarrelled with her people, and he had a very lonely boyhood and youth." "Then you know very little of how Varick lived before you yourself met him?
How old would he have been then, Blanche ?" "I should think four or five-and-twenty," she said hesitatingly.
"I suppose," and then Mark Gifford looked at her with a troubled, hesitating look, "I suppose, Blanche--I fear I'm going to surprise you--that you were not aware that he'd been married before ?" "Yes," she said eagerly, "I did know that, Mark." What on earth was he driving at?
That woman, Lionel Varick's first wife, was surely dead?
She, Blanche, had had, by a curious accident, someone else's word for that.

And then--there rose before her the vision of a ghastly-looking, wild, handsome face; quickly she put it from her, and went on: "He married, when he was only nineteen, a girl out of his own class.

They separated for a while; then they seem to have come together again, and, fortunately for Lionel, she died." "She died murdered--poisoned." Mark Gifford uttered the dread words very quietly.

"Almost certainly poisoned by her husband, Lionel Varick." A mist came over Blanche Farrow's eyes.