‘No, we shall not be penniless,’ exclaimed Laura. ‘There will be my income left. It is not quite three hundred a year, but we can manage to live upon that, can’t we, John?’ ‘I could live contentedly on a crust a day in the dingiest garret in Seven Dials if you were with me,’ answered her husband, in a low voice. Mr. Clare was walking up and down the room in a state of suppressed excitement. The whole business was too dreadful; he was hardly able to realize the enormity of the thing. This John Treverton was a scoundrel, and the estate must all go to found a hospital. Poor Laura must leave her luxurious home. The parish would be a heavy loser. It was sad, and troublesome, and altogether fraught with perplexity. And the Vicar had a cordial liking for this John Treverton. ‘What have you to say about the murder of that poor creature--your first wife?’ he exclaimed presently, walking up to the hearth by which Treverton and Laura were standing. ‘Only that I know no more who killed her than you do,’ answered John Treverton. ‘I did a foolish thing, perhaps a cowardly thing, when I left the house that night, with the determination never to return to it; but if you could know how intolerable my old life had become to me, you would hardly wonder that I took the first opportunity of getting away from it.’ ‘We had better look at things from a business point of view,’ said Mr. Sampson. ‘We are not going to do anything in a hurry. There will always be time enough for you to surrender the estate, Mr. Treverton, and to acknowledge yourself guilty of bigamy. But before you take such a step we may as well make ourselves sure of our facts. You married Mademoiselle Chicot in Paris.’ ‘Yes, on the eighteenth of May, sixty-eight. We were married at the Mairie. There was no other ceremony.’ ‘Under what name were you married?’ ‘My own, naturally. It was only afterwards that I got to be known by my wife’s name.’ ‘Were you known to many people in Paris by your own name?’ ‘To very few. I had written in the newspapers under a _nom de plume_,--my sketches at that time were all signed “Jack.” I was generally known as Jack, and after my marriage I became Jack Chicot.’ ‘How much did you know of your wife’s antecedents?’ ‘Very little, except that she had come to Paris from Auray, in Brittany, about five years before I married her; that she lived reputably, although surrounded by much that was disreputable.’ ‘But of her life in Brittany you knew nothing?’ ‘I only knew what she told me. She was a fisherman’s daughter, born and reared in extreme poverty. She had grown weary of the hard monotony of her life, and had come to Paris alone, and for the most part of the way on foot, to make her fortune. Auray is a long day’s journey from Paris by rail. It took her nearly a month to travel the distance.’ ‘That is all you know?’ ‘Positively all.’