e twenty-five long
years past!"

But the more he said, the more clear was it to Granny Marrable that he
was an escaped lunatic. There was, however, in all this sheer raving--as
she counted it--an entire absence of any note of personal danger to
herself. Her horror of him, and the condition of mind that his words
made plain, remained; her apprehension of violence, or intimidation to
make her surrender valuables, had given place to pity for his miserable
condition. His repeated use of the word "mother" had a reassuring effect
almost, while she accounted that of the word "son" as sheer
distemperature of the brain. But why should she not make use of it to
divert his mind from the terrible current of thought, whether delusion
or memory, into which he had fallen? "I never had but one son, sir," she
said, "and he has been dead twenty-three years this Christmas, and lies
buried beside his father in Chorlton church."

The fugitive convict--for the story need not see him any longer from old
Phoebe's point of view only--face to face with such a quiet and
forcible disclaimer of identity, could not but be staggered, for all
that this old woman's face was his mother's; or rather, was the face he
had imaged to himself as hers, all due allowance being made--so he
thought--for change from sixty-five to eighty. Probably, had he seen the
two old sisters side by side, he would have chosen this one as his
mother. Her eighty was much nearer to her sixty than old Maisie's. She
was no beautiful old shadow, with that strange plenty of perfectly white
hair. Time's hand had left hers merely grey, as a set off against the
lesser quantity he had spared her. As Dave Wardle had noticed, her teeth
had suffered much less than his London Granny's. Altogether, she was
marvellously close to what the convict's preconception of "Mrs.
Prichard" had been.

It is easy to see how this meeting came about. After he left the
hospitable cottage of the Solmes's, he had walked on in a leisurely way,
stopping at "The Old Truepenny, J. Hancock," to add another half-pint to
the rather short allowance he had consumed at the cottage. This was a
long half-pint, and took an hour; so that it was well on towards the
early November sunset before he started again for Chorlton. J. Hancock
had warned him not to go rowund by t' roo'ad, but to avail himself of
the cross-cut over the fields to Dessington. When old Phoebe overtook
him, he was beginning to wonder, as he sat on the