“No.”
Of course, he might have got somebody in Midlington to post them for him, but I doubted it. I did not think he had written them. His accusation merely came in queer corroboration of their statements. But anonymous letters and a drunken gutter-thief from Chicago. I should have to get a better case against Thoyne than that!
I stayed three or four days in London, having a good deal of business with publishers to transact, and for that period I left Cartordale and its concerns entirely alone. It was a visit from Stillman that plunged me once again into the thick of the mystery.
“It’s only a preliminary report,” he said, “but as far as it goes it is simple enough. Miss Grainger died at Long Burminster, a small village in the Midlands, about sixty miles from London. That was some months ago, and she left behind her a little baby girl, who has been adopted by the people—themselves childless—with whom Miss Grainger herself had been lodging. She wrote to her father, it seems, but he refused to visit her or to have anything to do with her child—said they could send it to the workhouse, which, however, they refused to do.”
I remarked that this seemed a very good and generous action on their part, to which Stillman replied with his characteristic, unbelieving grin, that they were being well paid for it.
“By whom—Grainger?” I asked.
“No,” Stillman replied. “Not by Grainger, but by Mr. Ronald Thoyne.”
“Thoyne!” I exclaimed. “Thoyne again! It seems to be always Thoyne. But what had he to do with Mary Grainger?”
Stillman went on with his story. He reminded me, in the first place, that Mary Grainger and Nora Lepley had been close friends, and that Thoyne had lodged at Lepley’s farm when he first went to Cartordale. He might have met her there; though he believed—he had not yet actually verified this—that Thoyne had been a patient in the hospital at Bristol where Mary Grainger and Nora Lepley had both served, the former as nurse, the latter as V.A.D.
“And is the suggestion, then, that Thoyne is the father of this baby?” I demanded.