ruel sea! Oh, my dear--that I
might have seen her once again! But once again!..." She stopped to
recover calm speech; and did it, bravely. "It was all in the seeming of
it, my dear, but all the same hard for me to understand. Very like, my
dear Ruth here was right and wise to keep it away from me. It might have
set me off again. I'm not what I was, and things get on my mind....
There now--my dear. See how I've made you cry!"

Gwen felt that this could not go on much longer without producing some
premature outbreak of her overtaxed patience; but she could sit still
and say nothing; for a little time yet, certainly. "I'm not crying, dear
Mrs. Picture," said she. "It was riding against the cold wind. Go on and
tell me more." Then a thought occurred to her--a means to an end. "Tell
me about your father. You have never told me about him. When did he
die?"

"My father? That I could not tell you, my dear, for certain. For no
letter reached me when he died, nor yet any letter since his own, that
told me of Phoebe's death. Oh, but it is a place for letters to go
astray! Why, before they gave my husband charge over the posts, and made
him responsible, the carrier would leave letters for the farm on a
tree-stump two miles away, and we were bound to send for them there--no
other way! And there was none I knew to write to, for news, when Phoebe
was gone, and our little Ruth, and Uncle Nick. Such an odd name he had.
I never told it you. Nicholas Cropredy."

"I knew it," said Gwen heedlessly. Then, to recover her
foothold:--"Somehow or other! You _must_ have told it me. Else how could
I have known?"

"I _must_ have.... No, I never knew when my father died. But I should
have known. For I stood by his grave when I came back. Such a many years
ago now--even that! But I read it wrong. 'May, 1808....' How did I know
it was wrong, what I read? Because I looked at his own letter, telling
me of the wreck, and it was that very year--but June, not May. And my
son was with me then, and he looked at the letter, too, and said it must
have been 1818--eighteen, not eight."

Gwen saw the way of this. Phoebe's letter, effaced to make way for the
forgery, was to announce Isaac Runciman's death, and was probably
written during the first week of June, and posted even later. The
English postmark showed two figures for the date; indistinct, as a
postmark usually is. Could she utilise this date in any way to sow the
seeds of doubt of the authenticity