"This is Phil Morris, sir," spoke the farmer. "That we all thought dead. That we thought was her husband!" He indicated his niece with a backward twist of his thumb.
Jane laughed once more, and the man snickered feebly.
"Eh? What do you say?" Mr. Stirling turned sharply, and his eyes sent forth a lightning-flash.
"It's Phil Morris, sir,—that we thought was Molly's husband, drowned twenty years agone. And he wasn't drowned. And she and he they both has it that they wasn't ever husband and wife. She jilted him for another man; and she never went to Canada. And all these years that I've thought her true, she's been deceivin' me—takin' me in right and left. Livin' a lie, as the sayin' is. And it beats me, it does, to know what all the tellin' of lies has been for."
The Squire's face was set rigidly; his forehead dented and lined; his eyes bent, as in stern demand, upon Mrs. Morris. She came two steps forward, looking straight at him, with no sign of fear.
"It's Phil Morris that I was once engaged to," she said composedly. "And that I was to have married, as soon as I'd done nursing little Miss Katherine. I was to have gone out to him in Canada. And I let folks think I'd done it. But I didn't." She breathed a trifle harder, and seemed thinking what to say next. Her eyes and the Squire's met during this pause. "He wrote to say he was going to South America, and I was to make haste, and we'd be married before he left Canada."
"And you did not go."
"No. I'd met another by that time, that I liked a lot better. And I married him, and jilted Phil. And their names was pretty much the same, leastways in sound; and he didn't want his home-folks to know. And I didn't care. I'd got him, and that was all I wanted." The impassive face changed, just a little, with these words. "So I promised him I'd keep it dark; and I did."
Mr. Stirling listened thus far in silence. "A singular tale!" he said then thoughtfully.
"I'd got my reasons. They didn't matter to anybody else. If my husband wanted it, I'd got to do what he wanted."