----?" 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