“Gaster had much more to say upon the subject. He pretends to be interested in all reminiscences of the Strangways, and boasts of having served Cheriton House for nearly forty years. He remembers Evelyn Strangway when she was a little girl, handsome and high-spirited. He remembered the report of her death at Boulogne getting about the village, and he remembered mentioning the fact to Lord Cheriton at the time. There was an election going on just then, and his lordship had looked in to consult him, Joseph Gaster, about certain business details: and his lordship seemed shocked to hear of the poor lady’s death. ‘I suppose that is the end of the family, my Lord?’ Gaster said, and his lordship replied, ‘Yes, that is the end of the Strangways.’ “Gaster believes that he must have read of the death in the newspapers; perhaps copied from the _Times_ into a local paper; at any rate, the fact had implanted itself in his mind, and it had never occurred to him to doubt it. “I asked him if he knew what had become of the lady’s husband, but here his mind is a blank. He had heard that the man was a scamp, and that was all he knew about him. “Since making these inquiries I have spent a long evening at the Literary Institute, where, as you know, there is a set of the _Times_, in volumes, extending over a period of forty years. I have looked through the deaths for three years, taking the year in which Gaster _thinks_ he heard of Mrs. Darcy’s death, as the middle year out of three, but without result. It is, of course, unlikely that the death would be advertised if the poor lady died friendless and in poverty in a foreign town; but I thought it my duty to make this investigation. “Awaiting your further commands, &c., &c.” There was nothing conclusive in this; and Theodore felt that the history of Mrs. Darcy’s later years remained to be unravelled. It was not to be supposed that the runaway wife, who, if she were yet living must be an elderly woman, could have had act or part in the murder of Sir Godfrey Carmichael; but it was not the less a part of his task to trace her story to its final chapter. Then only could he convince Juanita of the wildness of that idea which connected the catastrophe of the 29th of July with the exiled Strangways. When he could say to her, “You see that long before that fatal night the Squire’s three children had vanished from this earth,” she would be constrained to confess that the solution of the mystery was not to be sought here.