Fortunately for Everard’s purpose, Griggs proved not only to be alive, but still in the service of the same firm—a third-rate clerk on a very limited salary. He was a thin, timid, nervous man, with an anxious, hungry sort of look, as though he rarely had as much to eat as he could have done with. When told the reason which had induced Everard to seek him out, he at once expressed his willingness to give him all the information that lay in his power; but as he was too busy to do so during office hours, he requested Everard to call upon him between seven and eight o’clock the same evening at an address in the suburbs which he gave him. There Lisle found himself at half-past seven and was at once ushered into the clerk’s little parlour, in which sacred apartment—hardly ever entered between one Sunday and another—a fire had this evening been lighted in honour of his visit. There proved to be no reticence on Griggs’ part in discussing in all its bearings that strange episode of twenty years before, in which his sister had played so inexplicable and, ultimately, so tragical a part. It appeared that she had always been of a romantic and flighty turn of mind, and an insatiable devourer of impossible romances and outrageous love-stories of the very commonest type of penny fiction. She had gone out to the States as maid to a wealthy elderly lady who had died there shortly after her arrival. The next news from Martha had been to the effect that she was on the eve of returning to England by the clipper-ship Pandora, and her brother was requested to meet the vessel on its arrival in dock. Why she had booked herself under the fantastical name of Mrs. Montmorenci-Vane her brother could not imagine, unless it were a name she had picked up in the course of her reading, and had taken a fancy to. Just as little could he understand why, in the presumed state of her finances, she should have chosen to travel as a saloon passenger. As for whence and from whom his sister had obtained the child which she had passed off on board ship as her own, and what possible object she could have had in view in perpetrating such a hoax—if hoax it could be called—was to Kirby Griggs still as much an enigma as it had been at the time; nothing had occurred in the interim to throw even the faintest ray of light on the affair. Everard’s heart sank within him. It was evident that the lawyer’s clerk had nothing of consequence to relate beyond what was known to him already. After musing awhile, he said: “I presume that nothing was found among your sister’s luggage—no letters, or papers, or anything else which, if placed in the hands of anyone who was willing to devote both time and patience to following it up, might ultimately furnish a clue to the mystery we have just been discussing.”