John. ’P.S. I shall register the letter to make sure.  Telegraph if you would like me to come.’

Well, we telegraphed, though mother doesn’t hold with such things, looking on it as flying in the face of Providence and what’s natural.  But we got it all in, with the address, for sixpence, and Harry was as pleased as Punch to think of seeing his brother again.  But mother said she doubted if it would bring a blessing.  And on the Sunday morning John came.

He was a very agreeable, gentlemanly man, with such manners as you don’t see in Littlington—­no, nor in Polegate neither,—­and very changed from the boy with the red cheeks as used to come past our house on his way to school when he was very little.

Harry met him at the station and brought him home, and when he come in he kissed me like a brother, and mother too, and he said—­

’The best good of trouble, ma’am, is to show you who your friends really are.’

‘Ah,’ says mother, ’I doubt if all the detectives in London, asking your pardon, Master John, can set Master Harry up in his own again.  But he’s got a pair of hands, and so has my Polly, and he might have chosen worse, though I says it.’

Now, after dinner, when I’d cleared away, nothing would serve but I must go out with the two of them.  So we went out, and walked up on to the Downs for quietness’ sake, and it was a warm day and soft, though November, and we leaned against a grey gate and talked it all over.

Then says Master John, ’Look here, Polly, we aren’t to have any secrets from you.  There’s no doubt they were married, but doesn’t it seem to you rather strange that my poor old father should have been taken off so suddenly after the wedding?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but the doctors seemed to understand all about it.’

Then he said something about the doctors that it was just as well they weren’t there to hear, and he went on—­

’Of course I thought at first they weren’t married, so I set about finding out what they did when they came to London; and I haven’t found out what my father did, but I did pounce on a bit of news, and that’s that she wasn’t with him the whole day.  They came to Charing Cross by the same train, but he wasn’t with her when she went to get that arsenic from the chemist’s.’

‘What!’ says I, ‘arsenic?’

‘Yes,’ says John, ’don’t you get excited, my dear.  I found that out by a piece of luck once as doesn’t come to a man every day of the week.  A woman answering to her description went into a chemist’s shop, and the assistant gave the arsenic, a shilling’s-worth it was, to kill rats with.’

’And God above only knows why they put such bits of fools into a shop to sell sixpenny-worths of death over the counter,’ says Harry.

’Now the question is:  Was this woman answering to her description really Mrs. Blake or not?’

‘It was Mrs. Blake,’ says I, very short and sharp.