He was seated in a deep chair facing them, they being on a roomy lounge, side by side, and, consequently able to fix their eyes fully upon him. The task he had to go through might have unnerved any man, but he had set himself to do it. "Before I make any statement," he said, "look at these," and he produced two letters worn with time and with the ink faded. The other took them, and noted that they were addressed to, 'My own dear wife,' and signed, 'Your loving husband, Gervase Occleve.' And one of them was headed 'Le Vocq, Auberge Belle-Vue.' "Are they in your father's handwriting?" he asked, and Gervase answered "Yes." "It was in 1852," Cundall said, "that he met my mother. She was staying in Paris with a distant relative of hers, and they were in the habit of constantly meeting. I bear his memory in no respect--he was a cold-hearted, selfish man--and I may say that, although he loved her, he never originally intended to marry her. She told me this herself, in a letter she left behind to be opened by me alone, when I came of age. He won her love, and, as I say, he never intended to marry her. Only, when at last he proposed to her that she should go away with him and be his wife in everything but actual fact, she shrank from him with such horror that he knew he had made a mistake. Then he assumed another method, and told her that he would never have proposed such a thing, but that his uncle, whose heir he was, wished him to make a brilliant match. However, he said he was willing to forego this, and, in the eyes of the world at least, to remain single. For her sake he was willing to forego it, if she also was willing to make some sacrifice. She asked what sacrifice he meant, and, he said the sacrifice of a private marriage, of living entirely out of the world, of never being presented to any of his friends. Poor creature! She loved him well at that time--is it necessary for me to say what her answer was?" He paused a moment, and he saw that the eyes of Gervase were fixed upon him, but he saw no sympathy for his dead mother in them. Perhaps he did not expect to see any! "How she explained matters to the relation she lived with, I do not know," he went on; "but they were married in that year in London." "At what church?" Gervase asked. "At 'St. Jude's, Marylebone.' Here is the certificate." Gervase took it, glanced at it, and returned it to him. "Go on," he said, and his voice too had changed.