Read by the new light which had now broken upon me, even Mrs. Catherick’s letter, in despite of herself, rendered its mite of assistance towards strengthening the conclusion at which I had arrived.  She had described Mrs. Fairlie (in writing to me) as “plain-looking,” and as having “entrapped the handsomest man in England into marrying her.”  Both assertions were gratuitously made, and both were false.  Jealous dislike (which, in such a woman as Mrs. Catherick, would express itself in petty malice rather than not express itself at all) appeared to me to be the only assignable cause for the peculiar insolence of her reference to Mrs. Fairlie, under circumstances which did not necessitate any reference at all.

The mention here of Mrs. Fairlie’s name naturally suggests one other question.  Did she ever suspect whose child the little girl brought to her at Limmeridge might be?

Marian’s testimony was positive on this point.  Mrs. Fairlie’s letter to her husband, which had been read to me in former days—­ the letter describing Anne’s resemblance to Laura, and acknowledging her affectionate interest in the little stranger—­ had been written, beyond all question, in perfect innocence of heart.  It even seemed doubtful, on consideration, whether Mr. Philip Fairlie himself had been nearer than his wife to any suspicion of the truth.  The disgracefully deceitful circumstances under which Mrs. Catherick had married, the purpose of concealment which the marriage was intended to answer, might well keep her silent for caution’s sake, perhaps for her own pride’s sake also, even assuming that she had the means, in his absence, of communicating with the father of her unborn child.

As this surmise floated through my mind, there rose on my memory the remembrance of the Scripture denunciation which we have all thought of in our time with wonder and with awe:  “The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.”  But for the fatal resemblance between the two daughters of one father, the conspiracy of which Anne had been the innocent instrument and Laura the innocent victim could never have been planned.  With what unerring and terrible directness the long chain of circumstances led down from the thoughtless wrong committed by the father to the heartless injury inflicted on the child!

These thoughts came to me, and others with them, which drew my mind away to the little Cumberland churchyard where Anne Catherick now lay buried.  I thought of the bygone days when I had met her by Mrs. Fairlie’s grave, and met her for the last time.  I thought of her poor helpless hands beating on the tombstone, and her weary, yearning words, murmured to the dead remains of her protectress and her friend:  “Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at rest with you!” Little more than a year had passed since she breathed that wish; and how inscrutably, how awfully, it had been fulfilled!  The words she had spoken to Laura