can be quite certain.' 'I believe you are both of you wrong,' says
I. 'It's not in nature, comfortable and respectable as she is here,
that Mrs. Catherick should take up with a chance stranger like Sir
Percival Glyde.' 'Ay, but is he a stranger to her?' says my husband.
'You forget how Catherick's wife came to marry him. She went to him of
her own accord, after saying No over and over again when he asked her.
There have been wicked women before her time, Lizzie, who have used
honest men who loved them as a means of saving their characters, and
I'm sorely afraid this Mrs. Catherick is as wicked as the worst of
them. We shall see,' says my husband, 'we shall soon see.' And only
two days afterwards we did see."

Mrs. Clements waited for a moment before she went on. Even in that
moment, I began to doubt whether the clue that I thought I had found
was really leading me to the central mystery of the labyrinth after
all. Was this common, too common, story of a man's treachery and a
woman's frailty the key to a secret which had been the lifelong terror
of Sir Percival Glyde?

"Well, sir, Catherick took my husband's advice and waited," Mrs.
Clements continued. "And as I told you, he hadn't long to wait. On the
second day he found his wife and Sir Percival whispering together quite
familiar, close under the vestry of the church. I suppose they thought
the neighbourhood of the vestry was the last place in the world where
anybody would think of looking after them, but, however that may be,
there they were. Sir Percival, being seemingly surprised and
confounded, defended himself in such a guilty way that poor Catherick
(whose quick temper I have told you of already) fell into a kind of
frenzy at his own disgrace, and struck Sir Percival. He was no match
(and I am sorry to say it) for the man who had wronged him, and he was
beaten in the cruelest manner, before the neighbours, who had come to
the place on hearing the disturbance, could run in to part them. All
this happened towards evening, and before nightfall, when my husband
went to Catherick's house, he was gone, nobody knew where. No living
soul in the village ever saw him again. He knew too well, by that
time, what his wife's vile reason had been for marrying him, and he
felt his misery and disgrace, especially after what had happened to him
with Sir Percival, too keenly. The clergyman of the parish put an
advertisement in the paper begging him to come back, and s