“But how has she lived through all these years?” I asked.  “Was her husband able and willing to help her?”

“Both able and willing, sir,” said Mrs. Clements.  “In the second letter he wrote to my good man, he said she had borne his name, and lived in his home, and, wicked as she was, she must not starve like a beggar in the street.  He could afford to make her some small allowance, and she might draw for it quarterly at a place in London.”

“Did she accept the allowance?”

“Not a farthing of it, sir.  She said she would never be beholden to Catherick for bit or drop, if she lived to be a hundred.  And she has kept her word ever since.  When my poor dear husband died, and left all to me, Catherick’s letter was put in my possession with the other things, and I told her to let me know if she was ever in want.  ‘I’ll let all England know I’m in want,’ she said, ’before I tell Catherick, or any friend of Catherick’s.  Take that for your answer, and give it to him for an answer, if he ever writes again.’ "

“Do you suppose that she had money of her own?”

“Very little, if any, sir.  It was said, and said truly, I am afraid, that her means of living came privately from Sir Percival Glyde.”

After that last reply I waited a little, to reconsider what I had heard.  If I unreservedly accepted the story so far, it was now plain that no approach, direct or indirect, to the Secret had yet been revealed to me, and that the pursuit of my object had ended again in leaving me face to face with the most palpable and the most disheartening failure.

But there was one point in the narrative which made me doubt the propriety of accepting it unreservedly, and which suggested the idea of something hidden below the surface.

I could not account to myself for the circumstance of the clerk’s guilty wife voluntarily living out all her after-existence on the scene of her disgrace.  The woman’s own reported statement that she had taken this strange course as a practical assertion of her innocence did not satisfy me.  It seemed, to my mind, more natural and more probable to assume that she was not so completely a free agent in this matter as she had herself asserted.  In that case, who was the likeliest person to possess the power of compelling her to remain at Welmingham?  The person unquestionably from whom she derived the means of living.  She had refused assistance from her husband, she had no adequate resources of her own, she was a friendless, degraded woman—­from what source should she derive help but from the source at which report pointed—­Sir Percival Glyde?