“My memory’s got to be like a corn-sieve of late years,” he said, “but I ought to remember her name. She was at Cheriton over four years, and I only wish I had a guinea for every time I’ve sat behind her and Miss Strangway in the pony chaise. She was a light-hearted, good-tempered young woman, but she hadn’t bone enough for her work. She wasn’t up to Miss Strangway’s weight. Let me see now—what was that young woman’s name?—she was a good-looking girl, sandy, with a high colour and a freckled skin. I ought to remember.” “Take a glass of claret, Mr. Blake, and take your time. The name will come back to you. Have you ever heard of the lady since she left Cheriton?” “Never—she wasn’t likely to come back to this part of the world after having been turned out neck and crop, as she was. What was the name of the man who saw the apple fall?—Newton—that was it, Sarah Newton. Miss Strangway used to call her Sally. I remember that.” “Do you know where she came from, or what her people were?” “She came from somewhere near London, and it’s my opinion her father kept a shop; but she was very close about her home and her relatives.” “And she was young, you say?” “Much too young for the place. She couldn’t have been five and twenty when she left; and a girl like Miss Strangway, a motherless girl, wanted some one older and wiser to keep her in order.” “Had the Squire’s wife been long dead at that time?” “She died before I went to service at Cheriton. Miss Eva couldn’t have been much above seven years old when she lost her mother.” Theodore asked no more questions, not seeing his way to extracting any further information from the bailiff. He had been acquainted with most of these facts before, or had heard them talked about. The handsome daughter who ran away from a foreign school with a penniless subaltern—the Strangway temper, and the pitched battles between the spendthrift father and the motherless unmanageable girl—the life-long breach, and then a life of poverty and an untimely death in a strange city, only vaguely known, yet put forward as a positive and established fact. He had heard all this: but the old servant’s recollections helped him to tabulate his facts—helped him, too, with the name of the governess, which might be of some use in enabling him to trace the story of the last of the Strangways. “If there is any ground for Juanita’s theory, I think the man most likely to have done the deed would be the Colonel of Lancers, supposed to be drowned at Nice. If I were by any means to discover that the story of the drowning was a mistake, and that the Colonel is in the land of the living, I should be inclined to adopt Juanita’s view of the murder.”