would have said, almost certain to be paid by so loving a survivor! How
improbable that no two lines of life of folk concerned should ever
intersect thereafter, through nearly fifty years! And then, how about
her father?--how about possible half-brothers and sisters of hers?--how
improbable that they should remain quiescent and never seek to know
anything about their own flesh and blood, surviving in England! What a
tissue of improbabilities!

But then, supposing all facts known, would not old Maisie's daughter
have admitted their possibility, even made concession as to
probability? Had the tale been told to her then and there, at the
Ranger's Lodge in the Park, the two forged letters shown her, and all
the devil's cunning of their trickery, would it have seemed so strange
that her simple old aunt should be caught in the snare, or others less
concerned in the detection of the fraud? And had she then come to know
this--that when her mother in the end, twenty years later, came back to
her native land, her first act was to seek out the grave where she knew
her father was buried, and to find his name alone upon it; that she was
then misled by a confused statement of a witness speaking from hearsay;
and that she went away thereupon, having kept a strict lock on her
tongue as to her own name, and the marriage she now knew to have been no
marriage--had Ruth Thrale been told all this, would it not have gone far
to soften the harshness of the tale's incredibility?

That story was a strange one, nevertheless, of Maisie's visit to the
little graveyard in Essex, where she thought to find the epitaph of
Phoebe and of Phoebe's husband probably, and her father's to a
certainty. For wherever her brother-in-law and his wife were interred,
her father's remains must have been placed beside her mother's, in the
grave she had known from her childhood. But nothing had been added to
the inscription of her early recollections, except her father's name and
appropriate Scriptural citations; with a date, as it chanced, near
enough to the one she expected, to rouse no suspicion of the deceptions
her husband had practised on her.

Her consciousness of her equivocal position had weighed upon her so
strongly that she hesitated to make herself known to any of the older
inhabitants of the village--indeed, she would have been at a loss whom
to choose--and least of all to any of her husband's relatives, though it
would have been easy to find them. No d