"Now, have you said as much as that to anybody before?" he asked, eking
her significantly. "Have you mentioned it to your neighbours, for
instance, or to any one in the town?"

"No, sir!" declared Mrs. Summers promptly. "Not to a soul! I'm given to
keeping my ideas to myself, especially on matters of importance. There is
no one here in Marketstoke that I would have mentioned such a thing to,
now that the late steward, Mr. Marcherson, is dead. I shouldn't have
mentioned it to you two gentlemen if it hadn't been for this dreadful news
in the papers. No, I've kept my thoughts at home."

"Wise woman!" said Mr. Pawle. "But now let me ask you a few questions.
Did you know this Lord Marketstoke before he disappeared?"

"I only saw him two or three times," replied the landlady. "It was seldom
that he came to Ellingham Park, after his majority. Of course, I saw him
a good deal when he was a mere boy. But after he was grown up, only, as I
say, a very few times."

"But you remember him?" suggested Mr. Pawle.

"Oh, very well indeed!" said Mrs. Summers. "I saw him last a day or two
before he went away for good."

"Well, now, did you think you recognized anything of him--making
allowance for the difference in age--in this man who called himself John
Ashton?" asked Mr. Pawle. "For that, of course, is important!"

"Mr. Ashton," answered Mrs. Summers, "was just such a man as Lord
Marketstoke might have been expected to become. Height, build--all the