“I need not remind you that the position in which Mr. Vanstone was now placed could lead in the end to but one result—­to a disclosure, more or less inevitable, of the truth.  Attempts were made to keep the hopeless misfortune of his life a secret from Miss Blake’s family; and, as a matter of course, those attempts failed before the relentless scrutiny of her father and her friends.  What might have happened if her relatives had been what is termed ‘respectable’ I cannot pretend to say.  As it was, they were people who could (in the common phrase) be conveniently treated with.  The only survivor of the family at the present time is a scoundrel calling himself Captain Wragge.  When I tell you that he privately extorted the price of his silence from Mrs. Vanstone to the last; and when I add that his conduct presents no extraordinary exception to the conduct, in their lifetime, of the other relatives—­you will understand what sort of people I had to deal with in my client’s interests, and how their assumed indignation was appeased.

“Having, in the first instance, left England for Ireland, Mr. Vanstone and Miss Blake remained there afterward for some years.  Girl as she was, she faced her position and its necessities without flinching.  Having once resolved to sacrifice her life to the man she loved; having quieted her conscience by persuading herself that his marriage was a legal mockery, and that she was ‘his wife in the sight of Heaven,’ she set herself from the first to accomplish the one foremost purpose of so living with him, in the world’s eye, as never to raise the suspicion that she was not his lawful wife.  The women are few, indeed, who cannot resolve firmly, scheme patiently, and act promptly where the dearest interests of their lives are concerned.  Mrs. Vanstone—­she has a right now, remember, to that name—­Mrs. Vanstone had more than the average share of a woman’s tenacity and a woman’s tact; and she took all the needful precautions, in those early days, which her husband’s less ready capacity had not the art to devise—­precautions to which they were largely indebted for the preservation of their secret in later times.

“Thanks to these safeguards, not a shadow of suspicion followed them when they returned to England.  They first settled in Devonshire, merely because they were far removed there from that northern county in which Mr. Vanstone’s family and connections had been known.  On the part of his surviving relatives, they had no curious investigations to dread.  He was totally estranged from his mother and his elder brother.  His married sister had been forbidden by her husband (who was a clergyman) to hold any communication with him, from the period when he had fallen into the deplorable way of life which I have described as following his return from Canada.  Other relations he had none.  When he and Miss Blake left Devonshire, their next change of residence was to this house.  Neither courting nor avoiding notice; simply happy in themselves, in their children, and in their quiet rural life; unsuspected by the few neighbors who formed their modest circle of acquaintance to be other than what they seemed—­the truth in their case, as in the cases of many others, remained undiscovered until accident forced it into the light of day.