referred to in my presence by Mrs. Clements, I
had thought it the strangest and most unaccountable
of all places for Sir Percival to select for a
clandestine meeting with the clerk's wife.
Influenced by this impression, and by no other, I
had mentioned " the vestry of the church,"
before Mrs. Catherick, on pure speculation—it
represented one of the minor peculiarities of the
story, which occurred to me while I was speaking.
I was prepared for her answering me
confusedly, or angrily; but the blank terror that
seized her, when I said the words, took me
completely by surprise. I had, long before,
associated Sir Percival's Secret with the concealment
of a crime, which Mrs. Catherick knew of
—but I had gone no farther than this. Now,
the woman's terror associated the crime, either
directly or indirectly, with the vestry, and
convinced me that she had been more than the mere
witness of it—she was also the accomplice.

What had been the nature of the crime?
Surely there was a contemptible side to it, as
well as a dangerous side—or Mrs. Catherick
would not have repeated my own words, referring
to Sir Percival's rank and power, with such
marked disdain as she had certainly displayed.
It was a contemptible crime, then, and a
dangerous crime; and she had shared in it, and it
was associated with the vestry of the church.

The next consideration to be disposed of led
me a step farther from this point.

Mrs. Catherick's undisguised contempt for
Sir Percival plainly extended to his mother as
well. She had referred, with the bitterest
sarcasm, to the great family he had descended from
—" especially by the mother's side." What did
this mean? There appeared to be only two
explanations of it. Either his mother's birth
had been low? or his mother's reputation was
damaged by some hidden flaw with which Mrs.
Catherick and Sir Percival were both privately
acquainted? I could only put the first explanation
to the test by looking at the register of
her marriage, and so ascertaining her maiden
name and her parentage, as a preliminary to
further inquiries. On the other hand, if the
second case supposed were the true one, what
had been the flaw in her reputation? Remembering
the account which Marian had given me
of Sir Percival's father and mother, and of the
suspiciously unsocial secluded life they had both
led, I now asked myself, whether it might not
be possible that his mother had never been
married at all. Here again, the register might,
by offering written evidence of the marriage,
prove to me, at any rate, that this doubt had
no foundation in truth. But where was the
register to be found? At this point, I took up
the conclusions which I had previously formed;
and the same mental process which had
discovered the locality of the concealed crime, now
lodged the register, also, in the vestry of Old
Welmingham church.

These were the results of my interview with
Mrs. Catherick—these were the various
considerations, all steadily converging to one point,
which decided my course on the next day.

The morning was cloudy and lowering, but
no rain fell. I left my bag at the hotel; and,
after inquiring the way, set forth on foot for
Old Welmingham church.

It was a walk of rather more than two miles,
the ground rising slowly all the way. On the
highest point stood the church—an ancient,
weather-beaten building, with heavy buttresses
at its sides, and a clumsy square tower in front.
The vestry, at the back, was built out from the
church, and seemed to be of the same age.
Round the building, at intervals, appeared the
remains of the village which Mrs. Clements had
described to me as her husband's place of abode
in former years, and which the principal
inhabitants had long since deserted for the new
town. Some of the empty houses had been
dismantled to their outer walls; some had
been left to decay with time; and some were
still inhabited by persons evidently of the poorest
class. It was a dreary scene—and yet, in the
worst aspect of its ruin, not so dreary as the
modern town that I had just left. Here, there
was the brown, breezy sweep of surrounding
fields for the eye to repose on; here the trees,
leafless as they were, still varied the monotony
of the prospect, and helped the mind to look
forward to summer time and shade.

As I moved away from the back of the church,
and passed some of the dismantled cottages in
search of a person who might direct me to the
clerk, I saw two men saunter out after me, from
behind a wall. The tallest of the two—a stout
muscular man, in the dress of a gamekeeper—
was a stranger to me. The other was one of
the men who had followed me in London, on the
day when I left Mr. Kyrle's office. I had taken
particular notice of him, at the time; and I felt
sure that I was not mistaken in identifying the
fellow on this occasion. Neither he nor his
companion attempted to speak to me, and
both kept themselves at a respectful distance
—but the motive of their presence in the
neighbourhood of the church was plainly apparent.
It was exactly as I had supposed—Sir Percival
was already prepared for me. My visit to Mrs.
Catherick had been reported to him the evening
before; and those two men at my heels had
been placed on the look-out for me, near the
church at Old Welmingham. If I had wanted
any further proof that my investigations had
taken the right direction at last, the plan now
adopted for watching me would have supplied it.

I walked on, away from the church, till I
reached one of the inhabited houses, with a
patch of kitchen garden attached to it, on which
a labourer was at work. He directed me to the
clerk's abode—a cottage, at some little distance
off, standing by itself on the outskirts of the
forsaken village. The clerk was in-doors, and was
just putting on his great-coat. He was a cheerful,
familiar, loudly-talkative old man, with a
very poor opinion (as I soon discovered) of the
place in which he lived, and a happy sense of
superiority to his neighbours in virtue of the
great distinction of having once been in London.

"It's well you came so early, sir," said the