He had no need to sit alone at night with his books and his lamp, for there were plenty of houses in which he would have been welcome. His name was a passport in legal circles. Old friends of James Dalbrook’s were ready to welcome his kinsman to their tables, eager to be of service to him. He had his college friends, too, in the great city, and need not have gone companionless. But he was not in the mood for society of any kind, old or young, except the society of Blackstone, Coke, and Justinian, and divers other sages who out of the dim past shed their light upon the legal wilderness of the present. He sat by his fire and read law, and laid down his book only to smoke his meditative pipe and indulge in foolish waking dreams about that grave old house in Dorsetshire and the young widow who lived there. He had followed two of those three children of the old Squire, two out of the three faces in the picture in the hall at Cheriton, to the end of their story. No man could discover any postscript to that story, which in each case was closed by a grave. There remained only one last unfinished record—the history of the runaway wife, the end whereof was open to doubt. That unlucky lady’s fate had been accepted upon hearsay. It had been said that she had died at Boulogne, within a year or so after the Vicar met her there. Upon his return from Jersey, Theodore wrote to his father’s oldest and most experienced clerk, begging him to hunt up the evidence of Mrs. Darcy’s death, so far as it was obtainable at Cheriton or in the neighbourhood. The clerk replied as follows, after an interval of ten days:— “DEAR SIR, “I have been twice to Cheriton, and have made inquiries, cautiously as you wished, with respect to the report of Mrs. Darcy’s death, some fifteen years ago, and saw Mr. Dolby, the doctor, and Gaster at the general shop, who, as you are no doubt aware, is a gentleman who busies himself a good deal about other people’s affairs, and sets himself up for being an authority upon most things. “Mr. Dolby I found very vague in his ideas. He remembered the late Vicar telling him about having met Mrs. Darcy in the market-place at Boulogne, and being shocked at the change in her. He told Mr. Dolby that he did not think she was long for this world; but it was some time after when Dolby heard some one—he could not remember who it was—assert that Mrs. Darcy was dead.