“I think there will;—­very great difficulty,” Mr. Grey had said.

“Not the least.  But when I had to be married in the light of day, after Mountjoy’s birth, at Nice, in Italy, then there was the difficulty.  It had to be done in the light of day; and that little traveller with his nurse were with us.  Nice was in Italy then, and some contrivance was, I assure you, necessary.  But it was done, and I have always had with me the double sets of certificates.  As things have turned up, I have had to keep Mr. Grey altogether in the dark as regards Rummelsburg.  It was very difficult; but I have succeeded.”

That Mr. Grey should have been almost driven to madness by such an outrage as this was a matter of course.  But he preferred to believe that Rummelsburg, and not Nice, was the myth.  “How did your wife travel with you during the whole of that year?” he had asked.

“As Mrs. Scarborough, no doubt.  But we had been very little in society, and the world at large seemed willing to believe almost anything of me that was wrong.  However, there’s the Rummelsburg marriage, and if you send to Rummelsburg you’ll find that it’s all right,—­a little white church up a corner, with a crooked spire.  The old clergyman is, no doubt, dead, but I should imagine that they would keep their registers.”  Then he explained how he had travelled about the world with the two sets of certificates, and had made the second public when his object had been to convert Augustus into his eldest son.  Many people then had been found who had remembered something of the marriage at Nice, and remembered to have remembered something at the time of having been in possession of some secret as to the lady.  But Rummelsburg had been kept quite in the dark.  Now it was necessary that a strong light should be thrown on the absolute legality of the Rummelsburg marriage.

He declared that he had more than once made up his mind to destroy those Rummelsburg documents, but had always been deterred by the reflection that, when they were once gone, they could not be brought back again.  “I had always intended,” he had said, “to burn the papers the last thing before my death.  But as I learned Augustus’s character, I made quite certain by causing them to be sealed up in a parcel addressed to him, so that if I had died by accident they might have fallen into proper hands.  But I see now the wickedness of my project, and, therefore, I give them over to Mr. Grey.”  So saying he tendered the parcel to the attorney.

Mr. Grey, of course, refused to take, or even to touch, the Rummelsburg parcel.  He then prepared to leave the room, declaring it would be his duty to act on the part of Augustus, should Augustus be pleased to accept his services.  But Mr. Scarborough, almost with tears, implored him to change his purpose.  “Why should you set two brothers by the ears?” At this Mr. Grey only shook his head incredulously.  “And why ruin the property without an object?”