Edgar was glad, and yet I don’t know that a certain disappointment, quite involuntary and unawares, did not steal into his mind with this thought; for he had begun to cherish an idea of seeing his sister, of perhaps resuming something of his old intercourse with her, and at least of being known to have worked for and defended her. These thoughts, however, were but the secondary current in his mind, while the working part of it was planning a further enterprise for the morrow. He got the directory, and, after considerable trouble, found out from it the names and addresses of certain officials of the Wesleyan body, to whom he could go in search of the missing registers of the Hart Street Chapel--if registers there were--or who could give him definite and reliable information, in face of the conflicting testimony he had already received, as to whether marriages had ever been celebrated in it. Edgar knew, I suppose, as much as other men generally do about the ordinary machinery of society, but he did not know where to lay his hand on any conclusive official information about the Hart Street Chapel, whether it had ever been licenced, or had any legal existence as a place of worship, any more than--you or I would, dear reader, were we in a similar difficulty. Who knows anything about such matters? He had lost a day already in the merest A B C of preliminary inquiry, and no doubt would lose several more. Then he took out the most important of Miss Lockwood’s papers, which he had only glanced at as yet. It was dated from a small village in the Western Highlands, within reach, as he knew, of Loch Arroch, and was a certificate, signed by Helen Campbell and John Mactaggart, that Arthur Arden and Emma Lockwood had that day, in their presence, declared themselves to be man and wife. Edgar’s knowledge of such matters had, I fear, been derived entirely from novels and newspaper reports, and he read over the document, which was alarmingly explicit and straightforward, with a certain panic. He said to himself that there were no doubt ways in law by which to lessen the weight of such an attestation, or means of shaking its importance; but it frightened him just as he was escaping from his first fright, and brought back all his excitement and alarm. He did not go to Berkeley Square, as Mr. Tottenham had recommended, but to his old lodgings, where he found a bed with difficulty, and where once more his two lives seemed to meet in sharp encounter. But his head by this time was too full of schemes for to-morrow to permit of any personal speculation; he was far, as yet, from seeing any end to his undertaking, and it was impossible to tell what journeys, what researches might be still before him. CHAPTER XI. In the Depths.