"Yes, it has. Is it possible that you have not had intimation of it from Mr. Fauntleroy?"
Mr. Mynn paused a moment. Mr. George, who had been looking at his boots, raised his head to listen.
"Where was it discovered?—who discovered it?" asked Mr. Mynn, with the air of a man who does not believe what is being said to him.
"The widow, young Mrs. Carr, found the notice of it. In searching her late father-in-law's desk, she discovered a letter written by him to his son. It was the week subsequent to her husband's death. The letter had slipped between the leaves of an old blotting-book, and lain there unsuspected. While poor Robert Carr the clergyman was wearing away his last days of life in those fruitless searchings of the London churches, he little thought how his own carelessness had forced it upon him. He examined this very desk when his father died, for any papers there might be in it, and must have examined it imperfectly, for there the letter must have been."
"But what was in the letter?" asked George Mynn, speaking for the first time since the topic arose.
"It stated that he had married the young lady who went away with him, Martha Ann Hughes, on the morning they left Westerbury—married her at her own parish church, St.—St.—I forget the name."
"Her parish church was St. James the Less," said Mr. Mynn, speaking very fast.
"Yes, that was it; I remember now. It struck me at the time as being a somewhat uncommon appellation. That is where the marriage took place, on the morning they left Westerbury."
Mr. Mynn sat down; he had need of some rest to recover his consternation. Mr. George never spoke: he said afterwards, that the thought flashed upon him, he could not tell how or why, that the letter was a fraud.
"How did you know of this?" was Mr. Mynn's first question.