ictest privacy surprised nobody. He lived in our
neighbourhood till he came in possession of the Park. After three or
four and twenty years had passed, who was to say (the clergyman being
dead) that his marriage had not been as private as the rest of his
life, and that it had not taken place at Old Welmingham church?

So, as I told you, the son found our neighbourhood the surest place he
could choose to set things right secretly in his own interests. It may
surprise you to hear that what he really did to the marriage register
was done on the spur of the moment--done on second thoughts.

His first notion was only to tear the leaf out (in the right year and
month), to destroy it privately, to go back to London, and to tell the
lawyers to get him the necessary certificate of his father's marriage,
innocently referring them of course to the date on the leaf that was
gone. Nobody could say his father and mother had NOT been married
after that, and whether, under the circumstances, they would stretch a
point or not about lending him the money (he thought they would), he
had his answer ready at all events, if a question was ever raised about
his right to the name and the estate.

But when he came to look privately at the register for himself, he
found at the bottom of one of the pages for the year eighteen hundred
and three a blank space left, seemingly through there being no room to
make a long entry there, which was made instead at the top of the next
page. The sight of this chance altered all his plans. It was an
opportunity he had never hoped for, or thought of--and he took it--you
know how. The blank space, to have exactly tallied with his birth
certificate, ought to have occurred in the July part of the register.
It occurred in the September part instead. However, in this case, if
suspicious questions were asked, the answer was not hard to find. He
had only to describe himself as a seven months' child.

I was fool enough, when he told me his story, to feel some interest and
some pity for him--which was just what he calculated on, as you will
see. I thought him hardly used. It was not his fault that his father
and mother were not married, and it was not his father's and mother's
fault either. A more scrupulous woman than I was--a woman who had not
set her heart on a gold watch and chain--would have found some excuses
for him. At all events, I held my tongue, and helped to screen what he
was about.

He wa