say more,
giving reasons why, but changed her speech abruptly. "The youngest boy's
name I let slip. But I know it was never this name that man gave me."

"You remember it near enough for that?"

Granny Marrable's intense truthfulness would not allow margins.
"No--it's clean slipped my memory, and I could not make oath I never
knew it. It was all out of reach, beyond the seas."

"That seems reasonable. Five-and-forty years! Now, can I remember
anything as long back as that?... However, I was two, so that doesn't
count."

"Maisie's son never bore this name. That's out of doubt!"

"Why?"

"Because her first was christened by it, and died at Darenth Mill, after
... after his father went away."

"Roger Trufitt's son is Roger. But both his brothers who died before he
was born were named Roger. There's no law against it. You know old
Trufitt, the landlord at the Five Bells? He says that if this son died,
he would marry again to have another and call him Roger. He's a very
obstinate man, old Trufitt."

Granny Marrable sat silent while the doctor chatted, watching her
changes of countenance. Her conscience was vacillating. Could she
interpret her oath of silence as leaving her free to speak of the
convict's claim to Mrs. Prichard as a parent? The extenuation of bad
faith would lie in the purely exceptional nature of the depository of
her secret. Could a disclosure to a professional ear, which secrets
entered every day, be accounted "splitting"? She thought she saw her way
to a limited revelation, which would meet the case without breach of
confidence.

"Maybe!" said she, putting old Trufitt out of court. "But I can tell ye
another reason why he's no son of my sister's. Though he might be, mind
you, a son of her husband. My brother-in-law, most like, married again.
How should I know?"

"What's the other reason?"

"He told me his mother's name. But I am not free to tell it, by reason I
promised not to."

This struck the doctor as odd. "How came you to be talking to a stray
tramp about his mother, Granny Marrable?" he asked shrewdly.

"Because he took me for his mother, and would have it I should know
him." This was no doubt included in what she had promised not to tell,
but the question had taken her by surprise.

A light broke on Dr. Nash. All through the interview he had been
wondering at himself for never having before observed the likeness
between the two old women, which he now saw plainly by the light of t