‘We are not going to be flummoxed--excuse the vulgarity of the expression--quite so easily,’ said Sampson. ‘Everybody can’t be dead within the last seventeen years. Why, seventeen years is nothing to a middle-aged man. He scarcely feels himself any older for the lapse of seventeen years; there are a few gray hairs in his whiskers, perhaps, and his waistcoats are a trifle bigger round the waist, and that’s all. There must be somebody in this place who can remember your father. Let me think it out a bit. We want to know if a certain gentleman who was supposed by old Mr. Treverton to have died here, did really die, or whether he recovered and left the place, as a certain party asserts. All the probabilities are in favour of the one fact; and we have only the word of a very doubtful character for the other. Let me see, now, Mrs. Treverton, where shall we make our next inquiry? At the doctor’s? Well, you see, there are a dozen doctors in such a place as this, I dare say. At the undertaker’s? Yes, that’s it. Undertakers are long-lived men. We’ll look in upon the oldest established undertaker in the village. If your father died in this place, somebody must have buried him, and the record of his funeral will be in the undertaker’s books. But before I begin this business, which may be rather tedious, I should like to put you into a train, and send you back to London, Mrs. Treverton. A cab will take you from the station to your lodgings. You are looking pale and tired.’ ‘No, no,’ said Laura eagerly, ‘I am not tired. I had much rather stay. Don’t think of me. I have no sense of fatigue.’ Sampson shook his head dubiously, but gave way. They went to the village, and after making sundry inquiries at the post-office, Mr. Sampson and his companion repaired to a quiet, old-fashioned looking shop, in whose dingy window appeared the symbols of the gloomy trade conducted within. Here they found an old man, who emerged from a workshop in the rear, bringing with him the aromatic odour of elm shavings. ‘Come,’ said Sampson cheerily, ‘you’re old enough to remember seventeen years ago. You look like an old inhabitant.’ ‘I can remember sixty years ago as well as I can remember yesterday,’ answered the man, ‘and I shall have lived in this house sixty-nine years come July.’ ‘You’re the man for us,’ said Sampson. ‘I want you to look up your books for the year 1856, and tell me if you buried Mr. Malcolm, of Ivy Cottage, Markham Lane. You buried Mrs. Malcolm first, you know, and the husband soon followed her. It was a very quiet funeral.’ The undertaker scratched his head thoughtfully, and seemed to retire into the shadow-land of departed years. He ruminated for some minutes.