herick,
or any friend of Catherick's. Take that for your answer, and give it
to HIM for an answer, if he ever writes again.'"

"Do you suppose that she had money of her own?"

"Very little, if any, sir. It was said, and said truly, I am afraid,
that her means of living came privately from Sir Percival Glyde."

After that last reply I waited a little, to reconsider what I had
heard. If I unreservedly accepted the story so far, it was now plain
that no approach, direct or indirect, to the Secret had yet been
revealed to me, and that the pursuit of my object had ended again in
leaving me face to face with the most palpable and the most
disheartening failure.

But there was one point in the narrative which made me doubt the
propriety of accepting it unreservedly, and which suggested the idea of
something hidden below the surface.

I could not account to myself for the circumstance of the clerk's
guilty wife voluntarily living out all her after-existence on the scene
of her disgrace. The woman's own reported statement that she had taken
this strange course as a practical assertion of her innocence did not
satisfy me. It seemed, to my mind, more natural and more probable to
assume that she was not so completely a free agent in this matter as
she had herself asserted. In that case, who was the likeliest person
to possess the power of compelling her to remain at Welmingham? The
person unquestionably from whom she derived the means of living. She
had refused assistance from her husband, she had no adequate resources
of her own, she was a friendless, degraded woman--from what source
should she derive help but from the source at which report pointed--Sir
Percival Glyde?

Reasoning on these assumptions, and always bearing in mind the one
certain fact to guide me, that Mrs. Catherick was in possession of the
Secret, I easily understood that it was Sir Percival's interest to keep
her at Welmingham, because her character in that place was certain to
isolate her from all communication with female neighbours, and to allow
her no opportunities of talking incautiously in moments of free
intercourse with inquisitive bosom friends. But what was the mystery
to be concealed? Not Sir Percival's infamous connection with Mrs.
Catherick's disgrace, for the neighbours were the very people who knew
of it--not the suspicion that he was Anne's father, for Welmingham was
the place in which that suspicion must inevitably exist. If I a