oubt also it made her speech
obscure to the only person of whom she made any inquiry. This person,
who may have been the parish clerk, saw her apparently looking for a
particular grave, and asked if he could give any information. Instead of
giving her sister's name, or her own, she answered:--"I am looking for
my sister's grave. We were the daughters of Isaac Runciman." His
reply:--"She went away. I could not tell you where" was evidently a
confused idea, involving a recollection by a man well under forty of
Maisie's own disappearance during a period of his boyhood just too early
for vital interest in two young women in their twenties. He had taken
her for Phoebe. But he must have felt the shakiness of his answer
afterwards. For nothing can make it a coherent one, as a speech to
Phoebe. On the other hand, it did not seem incoherent to Maisie. She
connected it with the false story of her sister's departure to nurse her
husband in Belgium, and the wreck of the steamer in which they recrossed
the Channel. Her tentative question:--"Did you know of the shipwreck?"
only confirmed this. His reply was:--"I was not here at the time, so I
only knew that she was going abroad to her husband." _He_ was speaking
of Maisie's own voyage to Australia, and took her speech to mean that
the ship _she_ sailed in was wrecked. _She_ was thinking of the forged
letter.

* * * * *

Have you, who read this, ever chanced to have an experience of how vain
it is to try to put oneself in touch with events of twenty or thirty
years ago? How came Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to be so near of a
tale if, as some fancy, they never put stylus to papyrus till Paul
pointed out their duty to them? Did they compare notes? But if they did,
why did they leave any work to be done by harmonizers?

However, this story has nothing to do with Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
Reflections suggest themselves, for all that, with unconscious Mrs. Ruth
Thrale in charge of her cousin by marriage, Keziah Solmes, making her
way by the road--because the short cut through the Park is too wet--to
the great old Castle, with a room in it where an old, old woman with a
sweet face and silver-white hair is watching the cold November sun that
has done its best for the day and must die, and waiting patiently for
the coming of a Guardian Angel with a golden head and a voice that rings
like music. For that is what Gwen o' the Towers is to old Mrs. Prichard