“Yes, sir.  Anne was born in the June month of eighteen hundred and twenty-seven—­and I think he came at the end of April or the beginning of May.”

“Came as a stranger to all of you?  A stranger to Mrs. Catherick as well as to the rest of the neighbours?”

“So we thought at first, sir.  But when the scandal broke out, nobody believed they were strangers.  I remember how it happened as well as if it was yesterday.  Catherick came into our garden one night, and woke us by throwing up a handful of gravel from the walk at our window.  I heard him beg my husband, for the Lord’s sake, to come down and speak to him.  They were a long time together talking in the porch.  When my husband came back upstairs he was all of a tremble.  He sat down on the side of the bed and he says to me, ’Lizzie!  I always told you that woman was a bad one—­I always said she would end ill, and I’m afraid in my own mind that the end has come already.  Catherick has found a lot of lace handkerchiefs, and two fine rings, and a new gold watch and chain, hid away in his wife’s drawer—­things that nobody but a born lady ought ever to have—­and his wife won’t say how she came by them.’  ‘Does he think she stole them?’ says I.  ‘No,’ says he, ’stealing would be bad enough.  But it’s worse than that, she’s had no chance of stealing such things as those, and she’s not a woman to take them if she had.  They’re gifts, Lizzie—­there’s her own initials engraved inside the watch—­and Catherick has seen her talking privately, and carrying on as no married woman should, with that gentleman in mourning, Sir Percival Glyde.  Don’t you say anything about it—­I’ve quieted Catherick for to-night.  I’ve told him to keep his tongue to himself, and his eyes and his ears open, and to wait a day or two, till he can be quite certain.’  ’I believe you are both of you wrong,’ says I.  ’It’s not in nature, comfortable and respectable as she is here, that Mrs. Catherick should take up with a chance stranger like Sir Percival Glyde.’  ‘Ay, but is he a stranger to her?’ says my husband.  ’You forget how Catherick’s wife came to marry him.  She went to him of her own accord, after saying No over and over again when he asked her.  There have been wicked women before her time, Lizzie, who have used honest men who loved them as a means of saving their characters, and I’m sorely afraid this Mrs. Catherick is as wicked as the worst of them.  We shall see,’ says my husband, ’we shall soon see.’  And only two days afterwards we did see.”

Mrs. Clements waited for a moment before she went on.  Even in that moment, I began to doubt whether the clue that I thought I had found was really leading me to the central mystery of the labyrinth after all.  Was this common, too common, story of a man’s treachery and a woman’s frailty the key to a secret which had been the life-long terror of Sir Percival Glyde?