After this explanation no objection was made to producing the copy.  A clerk was sent to the strong room, and after some delay returned with the volume.  It was of exactly the same size as the volume in the vestry, the only difference being that the copy was more smartly bound.  I took it with me to an unoccupied desk.  My hands were trembling—­my head was burning hot—­I felt the necessity of concealing my agitation as well as I could from the persons about me in the room, before I ventured on opening the book.

On the blank page at the beginning, to which I first turned, were traced some lines in faded ink.  They contained these words—­

“Copy of the Marriage Register of Welmingham Parish Church.  Executed under my orders, and afterwards compared, entry by entry, with the original, by myself. (Signed) Robert Wansborough, vestry-clerk.”  Below this note there was a line added, in another handwriting, as follows:  “Extending from the first of January, 1800, to the thirtieth of June, 1815.”

I turned to the month of September, eighteen hundred and three.  I found the marriage of the man whose Christian name was the same as my own.  I found the double register of the marriages of the two brothers.  And between these entries, at the bottom of the page?

Nothing!  Not a vestige of the entry which recorded the marriage of Sir Felix Glyde and Cecilia Jane Elster in the register of the church!

My heart gave a great bound, and throbbed as if it would stifle me.  I looked again—­I was afraid to believe the evidence of my own eyes.  No! not a doubt.  The marriage was not there.  The entries on the copy occupied exactly the same places on the page as the entries in the original.  The last entry on one page recorded the marriage of the man with my Christian name.  Below it there was a blank space—­a space evidently left because it was too narrow to contain the entry of the marriages of the two brothers, which in the copy, as in the original, occupied the top of the next page.  That space told the whole story!  There it must have remained in the church register from eighteen hundred and three (when the marriages had been solemnised and the copy had been made) to eighteen hundred and twenty-seven, when Sir Percival appeared at Old Welmingham.  Here, at Knowlesbury, was the chance of committing the forgery shown to me in the copy, and there, at Old Welmingham, was the forgery committed in the register of the church.

My head turned giddy—­I held by the desk to keep myself from falling.  Of all the suspicions which had struck me in relation to that desperate man, not one had been near the truth.

The idea that he was not Sir Percival Glyde at all, that he had no more claim to the baronetcy and to Blackwater Park than the poorest labourer who worked on the estate, had never once occurred to my mind.  At one time I had thought he might be Anne Catherick’s father—­at another time I had thought he might have been Anne Catherick’s husband—­the offence of which he was really guilty had been, from first to last, beyond the widest reach of my imagination.