The registers were produced, and the entry of the marriage found, under the date supplied by Miss Barlow. A duly certified copy of this entry being taken by Mr. Pointer, in duplicate, Maurice’s mission at Didmouth was concluded.
He parted from Mr. Pointer at the railway station, after having endured another hour of the jolting omnibus; and while the clerk hastened back to London with one of the two documents, Maurice went down the line to Seacomb with the other.
He had not been away a week, and yet he had established the one fact he most desired to prove, Justina’s right to bear her father’s name. He could now venture to confide Muriel’s story to Martin, or at least so much of it as might be told without reflecting on his dead mother.
He walked into the old farmhouse at breakfast-time next morning, after having spent the night at Seacomb, and crossed the moors in the autumnal mists of earliest morning, not without some hazard of losing his way.
Martin was surprised and delighted.
‘What good wind blows you here, dear old fellow?’ he cried, gladly.
‘The best wind that ever blew, I think,’ answered Maurice.
Mr. Trevanard had gone about his day’s work, he had taken to working harder than ever, of late, Martin said; so the two young men had the old hall to themselves.
Here Maurice told his story, Martin listening with profound emotion, and shedding no unmanly tears at the record of his sister’s sorrows.
‘My poor mother!’ he sobbed out at last. ‘She acted for the best—to save the honour of our family—but it was hard on Muriel—and she was sinless all the time—a wife, free from taint of wrong-doing, except that fatal concealment of her marriage.’