seemingly surprised and confounded, defended
himself in such a guilty way, that poor Catherick
(whose quick temper I have told you of
already) fell into a kind of frenzy at his own
disgrace, and struck Sir Percival. He was no
match (and I am sorry to say it) for the man
who had wronged him— and he was beaten in
the cruelest manner, before the neighbours, who
had come to the place on hearing the disturbance,
could run in to part them. All this happened
towards evening; and, before nightfall,
when my husband went to Catherick's house, he
was gone, nobody knew where. No living soul
in the village ever saw him again. He knew too
well, by that time, what his wife's vile reason
had been for marrying him; and he felt his
misery and disgrace—especially after what had
happened to him with Sir Percival— too keenly.
The clergyman of the parish put an advertisement
in the paper, begging him to come
back, and saying that he should not lose his
situation or his friends. But Catherick had too
much pride and spirit, as some people said too
much feeling, as I think, sir— to face his neighbours
again, and try to live down the memory
of his disgrace. My husband heard from him,
when he had left England; and heard a second
time, when he was settled, and doing well, in
America. He is alive there now, as far as I
know; but none of us in the old country—his
wicked wife least of all— are ever likely to set
eyes on him again."

"What became of Sir Percival?" I inquired.
"Did he stay in the neighbourhood?"

"Not he, sir. The place was too hot to hold him.
He was heard at high words with Mrs. Catherick,
the same night when the scandal broke out—and
the next morning he took himself off."

''And Mrs. Catherick? Surely she never
remained in the village, among the people who
knew of her disgrace"

"She did, sir. She was hard enough and
heartless enough to set the opinions of all her
neighbours at flat defiance. She declared to
everybody, from the clergyman downwards, that
she was the victim of a dreadful mistake, and
that all the scandal-mongers in the place should
not drive her out of it as if she was a guilty
woman. All through my time, she lived at Old
Welmingham; and, after my time, when the
new town was building, and the respectable
neighbours began moving to it, she moved too,
as if she was determined to live among them
and scandalise them to the very last. There
she is now, and there she will stop, in defiance
of the best of them, to her dying day."

"But how has she lived, through all these
years?" I asked. " Was her husband able and
willing to help her?"

"Both able and willing, sir," said Mrs. Cle-
.is. "In the second letter he wrote to my
good man, he said she had borne his name, and
lived in his home, and, wicked as she was, she
must not starve like a beggar in the street. He
could afford to make her some small allowance,
and she might draw for it quarterly, at a place
in London."

"Did she accept the allowance?"

"Not a farthing of it, sir. She said she
would never be beholden to Catherick for bit or
drop, if she lived to be a hundred. And she
has kept her word ever since. When my poor
dear husband died, and left all to me, Catherick's
letter was put in my possession with the other
things —and I told her to let me know if she
was ever in want. ' I'll let all England know
I'm in want,' she said, 'before I tell Catherick,
or any friend of Catherick's. Take that for
your answer —and give it to him for an answer,
if he ever writes again.'"

"Do you suppose that she had money of her
own?"

"Very little, if any, sir. It was said, and
said truly, I am afraid, that her means of living
came privately from Sir Percival Glyde."

After that last reply, I waited a little, to reconsider
what I had heard. If I unreservedly
accepted the story so far, it was now plain that
no approach, direct or indirect, to the Secret
had yet been revealed to me, and that the pursuit
of my object had ended again in leaving me
face to face with the most palpable and the most
disheartening failure.

But there was one point in the narrative which
made me doubt the propriety of accepting it
unreservedly, and which suggested the idea of
something hidden below the surface.

I could not account to myself for the circumstance
of the clerk's guilty wife voluntarily living
out all her after-existence on the scene of her
disgrace. The woman's own reported statement that
she had taken this strange course as a practical
assertion of her innocence, did not satisfy me. It
seemed, to my mind, more natural and more
probable to assume that she was not so completely
a free agent in this matter as she had
herself asserted. In that case, who was the
likeliest person to possess the power of compelling
her to remain at Welmingham? The person
unquestionably from whom she derived the
means of living. She had refused assistance from
her husband, she had no adequate resources of
her own, she was a friendless, disgraced woman:
from what source should she derive help but
from the source at which report pointed— Sir
Percival Glyde?

Reasoning on these assumptions, and always
bearing in mind the one certain fact to guide
me, that Mrs. Catherick was in possession of the
Secret, I easily understood that it was Sir Percival's
interest to keep her at Welmingham, because
her character in that place was certain to
isolate her from all communication with female
neighbours, and to allow her no opportunities of
talking incautiously, in moments of free intercourse
with inquisitive bosom friends. But
what was the mystery to be concealed? Not
Sir Percival's infamous connexion with Mrs.
Catherick's disgrace—for the neighbours were
the very people who knew of it. Not the suspicion
that he was Anne's father—for Welmingham
was the place in which that suspicion must
inevitably exist. If I accepted the guilty