When I left the station the winter evening was beginning to close in.  There was little hope of continuing my inquiries after dark to any useful purpose in a neighbourhood that was strange to me.  Accordingly, I made my way to the nearest hotel, and ordered my dinner and my bed.  This done, I wrote to Marian, to tell her that I was safe and well, and that I had fair prospects of success.  I had directed her, on leaving home, to address the first letter she wrote to me (the letter I expected to receive the next morning) to “The Post-Office, Welmingham,” and I now begged her to send her second day’s letter to the same address.

I could easily receive it by writing to the postmaster if I happened to be away from the town when it arrived.

The coffee-room of the hotel, as it grew late in the evening, became a perfect solitude.  I was left to reflect on what I had accomplished that afternoon as uninterruptedly as if the house had been my own.  Before I retired to rest I had attentively thought over my extraordinary interview with Mrs. Catherick from beginning to end, and had verified at my leisure the conclusions which I had hastily drawn in the earlier part of the day.

The vestry of Old Welmingham church was the starting-point from which my mind slowly worked its way back through all that I had heard Mrs. Catherick say, and through all I had seen Mrs. Catherick do.

At the time when the neighbourhood of the vestry was first referred to in my presence by Mrs. Clements, I had thought it the strangest and most unaccountable of all places for Sir Percival to select for a clandestine meeting with the clerk’s wife.  Influenced by this impression, and by no other, I had mentioned “the vestry of the church” before Mrs. Catherick on pure speculation—­it represented one of the minor peculiarities of the story which occurred to me while I was speaking.  I was prepared for her answering me confusedly or angrily, but the blank terror that seized her when I said the words took me completely by surprise.  I had long before associated Sir Percival’s Secret with the concealment of a serious crime which Mrs. Catherick knew of, but I had gone no further than this.  Now the woman’s paroxysm of terror associated the crime, either directly or indirectly, with the vestry, and convinced me that she had been more than the mere witness of it—­she was also the accomplice, beyond a doubt.

What had been the nature of the crime?  Surely there was a contemptible side to it, as well as a dangerous side, or Mrs. Catherick would not have repeated my own words, referring to Sir Percival’s rank and power, with such marked disdain as she had certainly displayed.  It was a contemptible crime then and a dangerous crime, and she had shared in it, and it was associated with the vestry of the church.

The next consideration to be disposed of led me a step farther from this point.

Mrs. Catherick’s undisguised contempt for Sir Percival plainly extended to his mother as well.  She had referred with the bitterest sarcasm to the great family he had descended from—­ “especially by the mother’s side.”  What did this mean?