“Yes—what of it?”
“You were there when Mary left, and—”
“No, I wasn’t. I had come home. I turned up ill and they sent me home.”
“Then you were not at Bristol when Miss Grainger ran away with Mr. Thoyne and—”
“Ran away!” she cried. “With Mr. Thoyne!”
She sat straight up in her chair and laughed in my face.
“Mary didn’t run away,” she went on. “She was married. I was there as her bridesmaid. I met them in London specially for it, and Mr. Thoyne was there, too, as best man. She married an American named Blewshaw. He was a patient in the hospital, like Mr. Thoyne. The marriage had to be kept secret because Mr. Blewshaw’s father would object. I didn’t like it, neither did Mr. Thoyne. He told me so. But it was Mary’s business, not ours, and she had agreed. They took a flat in London—oh, I know what you mean. When she died, Mr. Thoyne was paying for her, and he has kept her baby since. But that was because he had introduced Blewshaw to her, and Blewshaw had let her down. He thought he was in some sort of way responsible. I didn’t see it myself but he did. Blewshaw went off to America, and she followed him, only to find that he had a wife there already. When she discovered that she came back to England—she wouldn’t touch the money Blewshaw offered her—and tried to earn her living. But she didn’t tell anyone, not me, not her father. Mr. Thoyne found her just as she was almost at her last gasp, and he looked after her. Her father would have nothing to do with her nor with her baby. Mr. Thoyne found her quite accidentally, and he told me about her. I went down to Long Burminster to see her. That is the whole story.”
“Thoyne comes well out of it, anyway,” I said cheerfully.
Kitty went to him and kissed him, and I think with very little provocation would have kissed me too. She had loyally asserted her belief in him, and possibly had actually persuaded herself that it was genuine. But it was easy to see that she was enormously relieved when she heard Nora Lepley’s corroboration. After all, Mary Grainger had been a very pretty girl, and Thoyne was only a man.
When Nora had gone, Thoyne told us Mary Grainger’s story in more detail, though I can summarise it here in a few lines. It was just as she had recounted it to him, with annotations where necessary, from Mr. and Mrs. Job Greentree. Mary found work at first in Liverpool, where she landed on her return to England, and then, when that failed her, she left her baby with the people with whom she had been lodging, and set out to walk to London, a mad project, as it seemed, though she did better than one might expect.