tters short--he's found particulars of the marriage of
Michael Carstairs, who was said to have died unmarried. And I wish
Portlethorpe hadn't gone home to Newcastle before Mr. Ridley came to me
with the news."

Tired as I was, and utterly heart-sick about Maisie, I pricked up my ears
at that. For at intervals Mr. Lindsey and I had discussed the
probabilities of this affair, and I knew that there was a strong
likelihood of its being found out that the mysterious Martin Smeaton was
no other than the Michael Carstairs who had left Hathercleugh for good as
a young man. And if it were established that he was married, and that
Gavin Smeaton was his lawful son, why, then--but Mr. Ridley was speaking,
and I broke off my own speculations to listen to him.

"You've scarcely got me to thank for this, Mr. Smeaton," he said. "There
was naturally a good deal of talk in the neighbourhood after that inquest
on Phillips--people began wondering what that man Gilverthwaite wanted to
find in the parish registers, of which, I now know, he examined a good
many, on both sides the Tweed. And in the ordinary course of things--and
if some one had made a definite search with a definite object--what has
been found now could have been found at once. But I'll tell you how it
was. Up to some thirty years ago there was an old parish church away in
the loneliest part of the Cheviots which had served a village that
gradually went out of existence--though it's still got a name, Walholm,
there's but a house or two in it now; and as there was next to no
congregation, and the church itself was becoming ruinous, the old parish
was abolished, and merged in the neighbouring parish of Felside, whose
rector, my friend Mr. Longfield, has the old Walholm registers in his
possession. When he read of the Phillips inquest, and what I'd said then,
he thought of those registers and turned them up, out of a chest where
they'd lain for thirty years anyway; and he at once found the entry of
the marriage of one Michael Carstairs with a Mary Smeaton, which was by
licence, and performed by the last vicar of Walholm--it was, as a matter
of fact, the very last marriage which ever took place in the old church.
And I should say," concluded Mr. Ridley, "that it was what one would call
a secret wedding--secret, at any rate, in so far as this: as it was by
licence, and as the old church was a most lonely and isolated place, far
away from anywhere, even then there'd be no one to kno