"Miss Butterworth," said he, "I have not succeeded in making Mother Jane at any time go beyond her numerical monologue. But you have been more successful." And with a sudden marvellous change of expression, pose, and manner he threw over his head my shawl, which had fallen to the floor in my astonishment, and, rocking himself to and fro before me, muttered grimly: "Seventy! Twenty-eight! Ten! No more! I can count no more! Go." "Mr. Gryce, it was you----" "Whom you interviewed in Mother Jane's cottage with Mr. Knollys," he finished. "And it was _I_ who helped to bury what you now declare, to my real terror and astonishment, to have been a human being. Miss Butterworth, what about the knot of crape? Tell me." XXV TRIFLES, BUT NOT TRIFLING I was so astounded I hardly took in this final question. _He_ had been the sixth party in the funeral cortège I had seen pause in the Flower Parlor. Well, what might I not expect from this man next! But I am methodical even under the greatest excitement and at the most critical instants, as those who have read _That Affair Next Door_ have had ample opportunity to know. Once having taken in the startling fact he mentioned, I found it impossible to proceed to establish my standpoint till I knew a little more about his. "Wait," I said; "tell me first if I have ever seen the real Mother Jane; or were you the person I saw stooping in the road, and of whom I bought the pennyroyal?" "No," he replied; "that was the old woman herself. My appearance in the cottage dates from yesterday noon. I felt the need of being secretly near you, and I also wished for an opportunity to examine this humble interior unsuspected and unobserved. So I prevailed upon the old woman to exchange places with me; she taking up her abode in the woods for the night and I her old stool on the hearthstone. She was the more willing to do this from the promise I gave her to watch out for Lizzie. That I would don her own Sunday suit and personate her in her own home she evidently did not suspect. Had not wit enough, I suppose. At the present moment she is back in her old place." I nodded my thanks for this explanation, but was not deterred from pressing the point I was anxious to have elucidated. "If," I went on to urge, "you took advantage of your disguise to act as assistant in the burial which took place last night, you are in a much better situation than myself to decide the question we are at present considering. Was it because of any secret knowledge thus gained you declare so positively that it was not a human being you helped lower in its grave?"