"I don't think it fibs, my darling. Because I attach a good deal of weight to the impression it has produced upon you. But other people might, who did not know you."
"Other people are not to be told, so they are out of it.... Well, perhaps that has very little to do with the matter."
"Not very much. But tell me!—does the old lady give no names at all?"
"N-no!—I can remember none. Her real name is not Picture, of course ... I should have said Prichard."
"I understand. But couldn't you get at her husband's name, to verify the story?"
"I don't want it verified. Where's the use?... No, she hasn't told me a single surname of any of the people.... Oh yes—stop a minute! Of course she told me Prichard was a name in her family—some old nurse's. But it's such a common name."
"Did she not say where she came from—where her family belonged?"
"Yes—Essex. But Essex is like Rutlandshire. Nobody has ever been to either, or knows anyone that is there by nature."
"I didn't know that was the case, but I have no interest in proving the contrary. Suppose you try to get at her husband's name—her real married name. I could tell my man in Lincoln's Inn to hunt up the trial. Or even if you could get the exact date it might be enough. There cannot have been so very many fathers-in-laws' signatures forged in one year."
But Gwen did not like to press the old lady for information she was reluctant to give, and the names of the family in Essex and the delinquent remained untold; or, if told to Gwen, were concealed more effectually by her than the narrative they were required to fill out. And as the confidants to whom she had repeated that narrative were more loyal to her than she herself had been to its first narrator, it remained altogether unknown to the household at the Towers; and, indeed, to anyone who could by repeating it have excited suspicion of the twinship of the farmer's widow at Chorlton-under-Bradbury and the old lady whom her young ladyship's eccentricities had brought from London.