r to be married at so out-of-the-way a place as Rummelsburg, in
Pomerania. He had travelled about and found Rummelsburg peculiarly
fitted for his enterprise. There was a most civil old Lutheran clergyman
there, to whom he had made himself peculiarly acceptable. He had now
certified copies of the registry at Rummelsburg, which left no loop-hole
for doubt. But he had felt that probably no inquiry would have been made
about what had been done thirty years ago at Rummelsburg, had he himself
desired to be silent on the subject. "There will be no difficulty," he
said, "in making the Rummelsburg marriage known to all the world."

"I think there will;--very great difficulty," Mr. Grey had said.

"Not the least. But when I had to be married in the light of day, after
Mountjoy's birth, at Nice, in Italy, then there was the difficulty. It
had to be done in the light of day; and that little traveller with his
nurse were with us. Nice was in Italy then, and some contrivance was, I
assure you, necessary. But it was done, and I have always had with me
the double sets of certificates. As things have turned up, I have had to
keep Mr. Grey altogether in the dark as regards Rummelsburg. It was very
difficult; but I have succeeded."

That Mr. Grey should have been almost driven to madness by such an
outrage as this was a matter of course. But he preferred to believe that
Rummelsburg, and not Nice, was the myth. "How did your wife travel with
you during the whole of that year?" he had asked.

"As Mrs. Scarborough, no doubt. But we had been very little in society,
and the world at large seemed willing to believe almost anything of me
that was wrong. However, there's the Rummelsburg marriage, and if you
send to Rummelsburg you'll find that it's all right,--a little white
church up a corner, with a crooked spire. The old clergyman is, no
doubt, dead, but I should imagine that they would keep their registers."
Then he explained how he had travelled about the world with the two sets
of certificates, and had made the second public when his object had been
to convert Augustus into his eldest son. Many people then had been found
who had remembered something of the marriage at Nice, and remembered to
have remembered something at the time of having been in possession of
some secret as to the lady. But Rummelsburg had been kept quite in the
dark. Now it was necessary that a strong light should be thrown on the
absolute legality of the Rummelsburg ma