Maurice left London for Didmouth by the mail, accompanied by Mr. Pointer, a confidential clerk of Messrs. Willgross and Harding. Didmouth was still off the main line, and they had to drive seven or eight miles in a jolting little omnibus, very low in the roof, and by no means luxurious within. They reached Didmouth too late for anything except supper and bed, but they were at the sexton’s cottage before eight o’clock next morning, and thence repaired to the church, with the elderly custodian and his keys in their company.

The registers were produced, and the entry of the marriage found, under the date supplied by Miss Barlow. A duly certified copy of this entry being taken by Mr. Pointer, in duplicate, Maurice’s mission at Didmouth was concluded.

He parted from Mr. Pointer at the railway station, after having endured another hour of the jolting omnibus; and while the clerk hastened back to London with one of the two documents, Maurice went down the line to Seacomb with the other.

He had not been away a week, and yet he had established the one fact he most desired to prove, Justina’s right to bear her father’s name. He could now venture to confide Muriel’s story to Martin, or at least so much of it as might be told without reflecting on his dead mother.

He walked into the old farmhouse at breakfast-time next morning, after having spent the night at Seacomb, and crossed the moors in the autumnal mists of earliest morning, not without some hazard of losing his way.

Martin was surprised and delighted.

‘What good wind blows you here, dear old fellow?’ he cried, gladly.

‘The best wind that ever blew, I think,’ answered Maurice.

Mr. Trevanard had gone about his day’s work, he had taken to working harder than ever, of late, Martin said; so the two young men had the old hall to themselves.

Here Maurice told his story, Martin listening with profound emotion, and shedding no unmanly tears at the record of his sister’s sorrows.

‘My poor mother!’ he sobbed out at last. ‘She acted for the best—to save the honour of our family—but it was hard on Muriel—and she was sinless all the time—a wife, free from taint of wrong-doing, except that fatal concealment of her marriage.’

Then, when the first shock was over, the young man inquired eagerly about his niece, his beloved sister’s only child—the babe that had been exiled from its birthplace, robbed of its name.

‘How nobly, how wisely, how ably you have acted from first to last, Clissold!’ he exclaimed. ‘Without your help this tangled web could never have been unravelled. But how did it ever occur to you that Miss Elgood and my sister’s daughter could be one and the same person?’

‘Perhaps it was because I have thought so much more of Justina Elgood lately than any one else,’ answered Maurice; and then he went on to confess that his old wound was healed, and that he loved Justina with a deeper and truer love than he had given the doctor’s daughter. Martin was delighted. This would make a new link between himself and his friend.

Maurice’s next anxiety was for an interview with old Mrs. Trevanard. He wanted to test that aged memory, to discover how far the blind grandmother might be relied upon when the time came for laying this family secret before the world.

Mrs. Trevanard still kept her room. She was able to move about a little—able to keep watch and ward upon Muriel, but she preferred the retirement of her own chamber to her old corner in the family sitting-room.

‘The place would seem strange to me without Bridget,’ she told Maurice, when he expressed his regret at finding her still in her own room. ‘It’s not so much the rheumatics that keep me here as the thought of that. Bridget was all in all in this house. The old room would seem desolate without her. So I just keep by my own bit of fire, and knit my stocking, and think of old times.’

‘I dare say your memory is a better one than many young people can boast of,’ said Maurice, who had taken the empty chair by the fireplace, opposite Mrs. Trevanard.

‘Well, I haven’t much to complain of in that respect,’ answered the old woman, with a sigh. ‘I have sometimes thought that it is better for old people when their memories are not quite so strong as mine. But then, perhaps, that’s owing to my blindness. I have nothing left me but memory, I can’t see to read, not even my Bible, and I haven’t many about me that care to read to me. So the past is my book, and I’m always reading the saddest chapters in it. It’s a pity Providence has made us so that our minds dwell longest on sorrowful things.’

Maurice related his discovery gently and with some preparation to Muriel’s grandmother. When she heard that Muriel was sinless, that her marriage with George Penwyn was an established fact, the blind woman lifted up her vo............