be kept in
custody till he had been identified as being the man, or as not being
the man, who had married Miss Wainwright.

"There is nobody living with you now who knew Lady Fitzgerald at--?"
asked Mr. Prendergast.

"Yes," said Sir Thomas, "there is one maid servant." And then he
explained how Mrs. Jones had lived with his wife before her first
marriage, during those few months in which she had been called Mrs.
Talbot, and from that day even up to the present hour.

"Then she must have known this man," said Mr. Prendergast.

But Sir Thomas was not in a frame of mind at all suited to the
sifting of evidence. He did not care to say anything about Mrs.
Jones; he got no crumb of comfort out of that view of the matter.
Things had come out, unwittingly for the most part, in his
conversations with Mollett, which made him quite certain as to
the truth of the main part of the story. All those Dorsetshire
localities were well known to the man, the bearings of the house,
the circumstances of Mr. Wainwright's parsonage, the whole history
of those months; so that on this subject Sir Thomas had no doubt;
and we may as well know at once that there was no room for doubt.
Our friend of the Kanturk Hotel, South Main Street, Cork, was the
man who, thirty years before, had married the child-daughter of the
Dorsetshire parson.

Mr. Prendergast, however, stood awhile before the fire balancing
the evidence. "The woman must have known him," he said to himself,
"and surely she could tell us whether he be like the man. And Lady
Fitzgerald herself would know; but then who would have the hardness
of heart to ask Lady Fitzgerald to confront that man?"

He remained with Sir Thomas that day for hours. The long winter
evening had begun to make itself felt by its increasing gloom before
he left him. Wine and biscuits were sent in to them, but neither
of them even noticed the man who brought them. Twice in the day,
however, Mr. Prendergast gave the baronet a glass of sherry, which
the latter swallowed unconsciously; and then, at about four, the
lawyer prepared to take his leave. "I will see you early to-morrow,"
said he, "immediately after breakfast."

"You are going then?" said Sir Thomas, who greatly dreaded being left
alone.

"Not away, you know," said Mr. Prendergast. "I am not going to leave
the house."

"No," said Sir Thomas; "no, of course not, but--" and then he paused.

"Eh!" said Mr. Prendergast, "you were saying something."