“But tell me more about Miss Drummond,” I urged.
“What is there to tell? When she was old enough Fanny sent ’er to the national school at Deenethorpe. But she wasn’t at all like the village children. She was always the lady, even when quite young.”
“Your sister-in-law was well paid, I suppose?”
“Yes. She was a widow, and only had the money from the lawyer to live upon. Her husband was a wood-cutter, and was killed by a tree falling on him over in Carlton Purlieus. One time Fanny fell ill, and we had little Dolly with us at Rockingham for nigh on a year.”
Little wonder was it that she should have sought out the good-for-nothing old labourer who had in his younger and more sober days been as guardian to her.
“But I can’t understand why she should wish to meet you late at night,” I remarked.
“She didn’t wish her uncle to know of our meetin’, she said. Besides, she had a lot to ask me about her earlier days, and a lot to tell me of how she had fared since she had left these parts.”
“Did she make any mention of that story about the fortune of the Knuttons?”
“Well, sir, she did,” responded the old fellow, rather puzzled at what I had divined. “She told me how she remembered me telling her all about it when a girl, and how her Aunt Fanny, as she called her, used to prophesy that one day we should be very rich.”
“And what else?”