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I should finally have decided to make any use of the information I am not sure. But unfortunately"--he pointed to the letter still in Flaxman's hand--"that shows me that other persons--persons unknown to me--are in possession of some, at any rate, of the facts--and therefore that it is now vain to hope that we can stifle the thing altogether."
"You have no idea who wrote the letter?" said Flaxman, holding it up.
"None whatever," was the emphatic reply.
"It is a disguised hand"--mused Flaxman--"but an educated one--more or less. However--we will return presently to the letter. Mrs. Sabin's communication to you was of a nature to confirm the statements contained in it?"
"Mrs. Sabin declared to me that having herself--independently--become aware of certain facts, while she was a servant in Lady Fox-Wilton's employment, that lady--no doubt in order to ensure her silence--took her abroad with herself and her young sister, Miss Alice, to a place in France she had some difficulty in pronouncing--it sounded to me like Grenoble; that there Miss Puttenham became the mother of a child, which passed thenceforward as the child of Sir Ralph and Lady Fox-Wilton, and received the name of Hester. She herself nursed Miss Puttenham, and no doctor was admitted. When the child was two months old, she accompanied the sisters to a place on the Riviera, where they took a villa. Here Sir Ralph Wilton, who was terribly broken and distressed by the whole thing, joined them, and he made an arrangement with her by which she agreed to go to the States and hold her tongue. She wrote to her people in Upcote--she had been a widow for some years--that she had accepted a nurse's situation in the States, and Sir Ralph saw her off from Genoa for New York. She seems to have married again in the States; and in the course of years to have developed some grievance against the Fox-Wiltons which ultimately determined her to come home. But all this part of her story was so excited and incoherent that I could make nothing of