"One, I call to mind, was Isaac. For Maisie wrote me what work she had to persuade her husband to the name...." She had meant to say more, giving reasons why, but changed her speech abruptly. "The youngest boy's name I let slip. But I know it was never this name that man gave me."
"You remember it near enough for that?"
Granny Marrable's intense truthfulness would not allow margins. "No—it's clean slipped my memory, and I could not make oath I never knew it. It was all out of reach, beyond the seas."
"That seems reasonable. Five-and-forty years! Now, can I remember anything as long back as that?... However, I was two, so that doesn't count."
"Maisie's son never bore this name. That's out of doubt!"
"Why?"
"Because her first was christened by it, and died at Darenth Mill, after ... after his father went away."
"Roger Trufitt's son is Roger. But both his brothers who died before he was born were named Roger. There's no law against it. You know old Trufitt, the landlord at the Five Bells? He says that if this son died, he would marry again to have another and call him Roger. He's a very obstinate man, old Trufitt."
Granny Marrable sat silent while the doctor chatted, watching her changes of countenance. Her conscience was vacillating. Could she interpret her oath of silence as leaving her free to speak of the convict's claim to Mrs. Prichard as a parent? The extenuation of bad faith would lie in the purely exceptional nature of the depository of her secret. Could a disclosure to a professional ear, which secrets entered every day, be accounted "splitting"? She thought she saw her way to a limited revelation, which would meet the case without breach of confidence.
"Maybe!" said she, putting old Trufitt out of court. "But I can tell ye another reason why he's no son of my sister's. Though he might be, mind you, a son of her husband. My brother-in-law, most like, married again. How should I know?"