"Sure! Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox."
"Tell him anything else about Muggeridge?"
"Well, now—did I?... No—I should say not.... I was trying to think what I would have remembered to tell. For you must bear in mind, doctor, we were but young children when Muggeridge went away, and Axtell came, after that.... No. I could not speak to having said a word about Muggeridge, beyond his bare name. That I could not."
The doctor did not interrupt his witness's browsings in the pastures of memory; but when she deserted them, saying she had found nothing to crop, said suddenly:—"Didn't tell him about Muggeridge and the other lady, who wasn't Mrs. Muggeridge?"
"Now Lard a mercy, doctor, whatever do ye take me for? And all these years you've known me! Only the idea of it!—to tell a young child that story! Why—what would the baby have thought I meant? Fie for shame of yourself, that's what I say!" A very small amount of indignation leavened a good deal of hilarity in this. The old lady enjoyed the joke immensely. That she, at eighty, should tell a child of seven a tale of nuptial infidelity! She took her great-grandson into her confidence about it, asking him:—"Did they say his great-grandmother told shocking stories to innocent little boys?"—and so forth.
The doctor had to interpose upon this utter unconsciousness, and the task was not altogether an easy one; indeed, its difficulties seemed to him to grow. He let her have her laugh out, and then said quietly:—"But where did Mrs. Prichard get the story?"
Granny Marrable had lost sight of this, and was disconcerted. "What—why—yes—where did she get it? Mrs. Prichard, of course! Now, wherever could Mrs. Prichard have got it?..." It called for thought.
Dr. Nash's idea was to give facts gradually, and let them work their own way. "Perhaps she knew Mr. Muggeridge herself," said he. "When did he die?"
"Mercy me, doctor, where's the use of asking me? Before you were born, anyhow! That's him, a man of forty, with the horses and me a child under ten! Seventy years ago, and a little to spare!"
"That cock won't fight, then. As I make out, old Mrs. Prichard didn't come from Van Diemen's Land above five-and-twenty years ago."