"DEAR MR. MOLYNEUX," it ran, "I feel it is my duty to tell you that I have been making inquiries about Caroline Cushion, and there is no question whatever that she is the same person who was living here when my husband and I first came to the parish. It happens that Mrs. Bayley, widow of the former incumbent, is at present staying with Lady Moreland at the Manor, and I called upon her the day I returned from Mr. Vernon’s, that I might make searching inquiries as to where Caroline Cushion had lived before she left for Redmarley, where I understand she was left a cottage by her uncle, her mother’s brother. Mrs. Bayley remembered her perfectly well, and, I must say, spoke highly of her. But she was as astonished as I was to hear she was posing as a married woman with a family, for she had lived in this parish from her youth up. I grieve much that I should have to bring this life of duplicity to light; and I feel it is only right to let you know, that you may take steps to sift the matter and bring the woman to a proper sense of her wrong-doing. For if during the years she lived here she really possessed a husband and children, she shamefully neglected them; and if she is unmarried the case is infinitely worse. Please let me know the result of your investigations. "Yours sincerely, "ELAINE M. ROBINSON." In silence I gave back the letter to the vicar and involuntarily I shivered, for the wind was very cold. "Well?" he asked impatiently, "what do you make of it?" "I can’t make anything of it. The whole thing’s a mystery." Then I told him of my tea-time conversation with Mrs. Cushion, and of the curious constraint in her manner ever since: of how unhappy it made me, and how cordially I detested Mrs. Robinson and wished her far further than the Forest of Dean—though to the Redmarley folk the Forest of Dean is indeed as the ends of the earth. "If I know anything of human nature," said the vicar, punctuating his remarks with vicious flicks of the finger upon Mrs. Robinson’s envelope, "Mrs. Cushion is as honest and straightforward a woman as ever stepped, a _good_ woman, a kindly woman. Has she never said anything to _you_ about her husband?" "Only once. I asked about him, and I saw it was a painful subject, so I never mentioned him again. I fear he was an unsatisfactory person." "But what am I to say to this pestiferous woman? If I don’t answer her, she’s capable of coming over here and setting the whole village by the ears.... I should like," he added vindictively, "to throw a stone through her window." As he spoke I was reminded of Mrs. Cushion’s remark, "There’s something in men-folks as seems to stop growin’ when they be about ten year old": for although the vicar is stout and bald, and his close-cropped beard and moustache quite white, yet there and then I seemed to see "a little boy in tore knickerbockers and a dirty face same as if ’e stood in front of me."