"Then one day your husband found some papers. He was embarrassed and hampered, and I lent him money. He was not a good man of business, and I found it easy to lead him to do what I thought best--but it was equally easy for the next comer to make him do exactly the reverse. In all his difficulties his ruling wish was to put you beyond the reach of adversity, to make you independent. But he only succeeded partly. When he found those papers he came to me and said he had found some curious letters. They were letters from my father to my mother, and, had he read them, he would have known all; but he was an honourable fellow, and, having accidentally seen one and been amused by the spelling, he did not read any more. I was afraid of being too eager, and, before he could give them, he was taken ill and died, and you have those letters now, Anne; they are in that box some instinct, I suppose, made you keep." He lay back now exhausted--nothing save Mr. Stevens's sustaining hand had kept Mrs. Dorriman quiet. She was fearfully agitated: the cruel wrongs heaped upon her, the long years of a dependence which had galled her so terribly--everything came before her. Mr. Stevens, passing his arm round her, took her out of the room; he saw she could bear no more, she was overwrought. "Mr. Sandford opened his eyes, and saw her going. "Ah!" he said, bitterly, "at last I have driven her from my side, even her patient spirit is at length roused. Margaret." "Yes," she answered, in a constrained voice. "You are condemning me also." She could not speak. The times without number that she had seen him violent and abusive to poor Mrs. Dorriman, the cruel sting that being at his mercy had always been to the poor woman, the imposture, everything bewildered and shocked her. Mr. Stevens went back, Christie still leaned against the door like a statue. "How your fraud was successful, I cannot understand," he said, curtly. "Who was there to ask any questions? Who was to know what had passed?" asked Mr. Sandford; "I had nothing to prove. The result of my father's deception was to make all easy. As I had lived with him, been accepted as his legitimate son during his lifetime, during the time when he might have spoken, why should I not be accepted as his legitimate son when speech was denied him? There were no papers to prove or disprove anything, I was asked to produce no baptismal certificate, and no one thought of questioning me about my mother's marriage certificate. "But now you know all, take what steps you like to proclaim me to the world an impostor--what signifies it to me? No one can deny me the six feet of earth which is all I shall want directly." "Sir," said Christie, "when you sold the place was it for fear of a judgment if you lived in it?" "Sold the place! How could I live in the place to be reminded at every turn that it was not really mine? Every tree, every shrub, seemed to be a witness against me. I grew to loathe the place."