¶1J. A. McClure, Jr., McClure & Turville, St. Petersburg, Fla., for appellant.
¶2Arthur A. Simpson, Herbert S. Phillips, U. S. Atty., Paul Lake and Macfarlane, Ferguson, Allison & Kelly, Tampa, Fla., for appellees.
¶3Before HUTCHESON, Chief Judge, and RUSSELL and STRUM, Circuit Judges.
¶5This appeal presents the single question whether, on the facts 1 found by the Deputy Commissioner, Commissioner and Judge were right in rej ecting plaintiff’s claim that, within the meaning of Section 902(16),2 Title 33 U.S.C., she was the “widow” of Otis Thompson, deceased, and entitled to recover compensation as such.
¶6Here, appealing from the judgment approving the finding of the commissioner and dismissing her claim, plaintiff, admitting that the cases3 in this court, cited by the district judge in support of his judgment, do support it, assails those cases as wrongly decided.
¶7Citing as in conflict therewith two earlier decided cases, one from the Third4 and the other from the Second Circuit,5 and a later one from the Ninth Circuit,6 she insists that we should re-examine our decisions and, on the authority of the cited cases, disapprove and overrule them.
¶8We cannot agree. We find nothing in the reasoning of the cited cases to recommend them to our approval. On the con*529trary, we think they proceed upon a completely false premise. This is that the rejection of the wife’s claim is based upon the view that, at the time of the death of the husband, the wife was living an immoral life and must be punished therefor. While this fact points up the anomaly of her claim in instances where the new relation is knowingly meretricious, this is not at all the basic reason for its rejection. The reason is to be found in the precise terms of the statute which requires for recovery that “at the time of his death”, the woman claiming as “widow” must either be living •with or dependent for support upon her husband, or, if she is living apart from him that she. is doing so for justifiable cause or by reason of his desertion at that time.
¶9Our decisions therefore proceed upon the conclusion that living in the relation of wife to another man and having and raising children by and for him at the time of her husband’s death cannot he said to be justifiable cause for the wife’s not living with him. Neither, if causation is to mean anything, can it be said that a woman is, at the time of her husband’s death, living apart from him because of his desertion, when though originally deserted by her husband without fault on her part, she has made a new life for herself by living with another man as his wife.
¶10The fact made so much of in the Moore Dry Dock case, supra, that the deserted wife, in the good faith belief that her first marriage had ended in divorce, had entered into a new ceremonial marriage, while relevant on the question of her moral blameworthiness, would not show or tend to show that she was the statutory widow of the deceased. On the contrary, by showing that she had set up a new marital establishment on a permanent basis which the death of her first husband had legalized, it would show even more clearly than a meretricious relation would that she was not the widow of the deceased but another man’s wife.
¶11We are in no doubt that our cases were correctly decided and should not be departed from. But if we are incorrect in the view that they were well decided on their facts, the judgment should still be affirmed, since it is undisputed and found that three weeks before his death the deceased had endeavored to have the plaintiff return to him and she had refused to do so.
¶12The judgment was right. It is affirmed.