Miss Cheyne of Essilmont, Volume 3 by James Grant

A very simple circumstance -- an occasion of every-day life -- a railway journey, brought about the awful tragedy in her life, by which she was left a widow at twenty, after being wedded a year -- which she called a year of joy, left without a near relation in the world but her brother, Victor Gabion, a captain of Artillery, who, strange to say, was the source of all her sorrow.

'After leaving the English convent at Bruges, I returned to the house of my guardian, M. Hoboken, a merchant in the Avenue du Commerce here. My parents were dead; I had but one brother, Victor Gabion, to whose brother officer Lucien I had been betrothed by them, and whom I had known from his early boyhood, when we had been playmates together, and before we came to those restrictions in intercourse peculiar to French and Belgian society in later years.