aying that!" fervently exclaimed Mrs. Peckover,
smiling for the first time, and smoothing out her gown over her knees
with an air of inexpressible relief. "I'm rid of my grand fright now,
and getting to breathe again freely, which I haven't once yet been able
to do since I first set eyes on you. Ah! you're rough to look at; but
you've got your feelings like the rest of us. Talk away now as much as
you like. Ask me about anything you please--"

"What's the good?" he broke in, gloomily. "You don't know what I wanted
you to know. I come down here for to find out the man as once owned
this,"--he pulled the lock of hair out of his pocket again--"and you
can't help me. I didn't believe it when you first said so, but I do
now."

"Well, thank you for saying that much; though you might have put it
civiler--"

"His name was Arthur Carr. Did you never hear tell of anybody with the
name of Arthur Carr?"

"No: never--never till this very moment."

"The Painter-man will know," continued Mat, talking more to himself than
to Mrs. Peckover. "I must go back, and chance it with the Painter-man,
after all."

"Painter-man?" repeated Mrs. Peckover. "Painter? Surely you don't mean
Mr. Blyth?"

"Yes, I do."

"Why, what in the name of fortune can you be thinking of! How should Mr.
Blyth know more than me? He never set eyes on little Mary till she was
ten year old; and he knows nothing about her poor unfortunate mother
except what I told him."

These words seemed at first to stupefy Mat: they burst upon him in the
shape of a revelation for which he was totally unprepared. It had never
once occurred to him to doubt that Valentine was secretly informed
of all that he most wished to know. He had looked forward to what the
painter might be persuaded--or, in the last resort, forced--to tell him,
as the one certainty on which he might finally depend; and here was this
fancied security exposed, in a moment, as the wildest delusion that ever
man trusted in! What resource was left? To return to Dibbledean, and,
by the legal help of Mr. Tatt, to possess himself of any fragments of
evidence which Joanna Grice might have left behind her in writing?
This seemed but a broken reed to depend on; and yet nothing else now
remained.

"I shall find him! I don't care where he's hid away from me, I shall
find him yet," thought Mat, still holding with dogged and desperate
obstinacy to his first superstition, in spite of every fresh sign that
appeared to