"That she did, good honest soul, as fast as she could travel, carrying a full purse along with her. She found poor Susan at an inn near Aldersgate-street—the old quarter, you see, that she'd known in her young days. Mrs. Halliday meant to have brought the poor soul back to Yorkshire, and had settled it all with Jim; but it was too late for anything of that kind. She found Susan dying, wandering in her mind off and on, but just able to recognise her sister, and to ask forgiveness for having trusted to Montagu Kingdon, instead of taking counsel from those that wished her well."

"Was that all?" I asked presently.

Mr. Mercer made long pauses in the course of his narrative, during which we walked briskly on; he pondering on those past events, I languishing for further information.

"Well, lad, that was about all. Where Susan had been in all those years, or what she had been doing, was more than Mrs. Halliday could find out. Of late she had been living somewhere abroad. The clothes she had last worn were of foreign make, very poor and threadbare; and there was one little box in her room at the inn that had been made at Rouen, for the name of a Rouen trunkmaker was on the inside of the lid. There were no letters or papers of any kind in the box; so you see there was no way of finding out what the poor creature's life had been. All her sister could do was to stay with her and comfort her to the last, and to see that she was quietly laid to rest in a decent grave. She was buried in a quiet little city churchyard, somewhere where there are green trees among the smoke of the chimney-pots. Montagu Kingdon had been dead some years when that happened."

"Is that last letter still in existence?" I asked.

"Yes; my first wife kept it with the rest of her family letters and papers. Dorothy takes care of them now. We country folks set store by those sort of things, you know."

I would fain have asked Mr. Mercer to let me see this last letter written by Susan Meynell; but what excuse could I devise for so doing? I was completely fettered by my promise to George Sheldon, and could offer no reasonable pretence for my curiosity.

There was one point which I was bound to push home in the interests of my Sheldon, or, shall I not rather say, of my Charlotte? That all-important point was the question of marriage or no marriage. "You feel quite clear as to the fact that Montagu Kingdon never did marry this young woman?" I said.

"Well, yes," replied uncle Joe; "that was proved beyond doubt, I'm sorry to say. Mr. Kingdon never could have dared to come back here with his West-Indian wife in poor Susan Meynell's lifetime if he had really married her."