There appeared to be only two explanations of it.  Either his mother’s birth had been low, or his mother’s reputation was damaged by some hidden flaw with which Mrs. Catherick and Sir Percival were both privately acquainted?  I could only put the first explanation to the test by looking at the register of her marriage, and so ascertaining her maiden name and her parentage as a preliminary to further inquiries.

On the other hand, if the second case supposed were the true one, what had been the flaw in her reputation?  Remembering the account which Marian had given me of Sir Percival’s father and mother, and of the suspiciously unsocial secluded life they had both led, I now asked myself whether it might not be possible that his mother had never been married at all.  Here again the register might, by offering written evidence of the marriage, prove to me, at any rate, that this doubt had no foundation in truth.  But where was the register to be found?  At this point I took up the conclusions which I had previously formed, and the same mental process which had discovered the locality of the concealed crime, now lodged the register also in the vestry of Old Welmingham church.

These were the results of my interview with Mrs. Catherick—­these were the various considerations, all steadily converging to one point, which decided the course of my proceedings on the next day.

The morning was cloudy and lowering, but no rain fell.  I left my bag at the hotel to wait there till I called for it, and, after inquiring the way, set forth on foot for Old Welmingham church.

It was a walk of rather more than two miles, the ground rising slowly all the way.

On the highest point stood the church—­an ancient, weather-beaten building, with heavy buttresses at its sides, and a clumsy square tower in front.  The vestry at the back was built out from the church, and seemed to be of the same age.  Round the building at intervals appeared the remains of the village which Mrs. Clements had described to me as her husband’s place of abode in former years, and which the principal inhabitants had long since deserted for the new town.  Some of the empty houses had been dismantled to their outer walls, some had been left to decay with time, and some were still inhabited by persons evidently of the poorest class.  It was a dreary scene, and yet, in the worst aspect of its ruin, not so dreary as the modern town that I had just left.  Here there was the brown, breezy sweep of surrounding fields for the eye to repose on—­here the trees, leafless as they were, still varied the monotony of the prospect, and helped the mind to look forward to summer-time and shade.

As I moved away from the back of the church, and passed some of the dismantled cottages in search of a person who might direct me to the clerk, I saw two men saunter out after me from behind a wall.  The tallest of the two—­a stout muscular man in the dress of a gamekeeper—­was a stranger to me.  The other was one of the men who had followed me in London on the day when I left Mr. Kyrle’s office.  I had taken particular notice of him at the time; and I felt sure that I was not mistaken in identifying the fellow on this occasion.