“But how did you ascertain this?  Your suspicions, you know, were directed to Mr. John Massingbird:  wrongly, as I believed; as I told you.”

“Yes, they were wrong,” said Robin.  “I was put upon the wrong scent:  but not wilfully.  You might remember a dairy wench that lived at Verner’s Pride in them days, sir—­Dolly, her name was; she that went and got married after to Joe Stubbs, Mr. Bitterworth’s wagoner.  It was she told me, sir.  I used to be up there a good bit with Stubbs, and one day when I was sick and ill there, the wife told me she had seen one of the gentlemen come from the Willow Pool that past night.  I pressed her to tell me which of them, and at first she said she couldn’t, and then she said it was Mr. John.  I never thought but she told me right, but it seems—­as she confesses now—­that she only fixed on him to satisfy me, and because she thought he was dead, over in Australia, and it wouldn’t matter if she did say it.  I worried her life out over it, she says; and it’s like I did.  She says now, if she was put upon her Bible oath, she couldn’t say which of the gentlemen it was, more nor the other; but she did see one of ’em.”

“But this is not telling me how you know it to have been Mr. Frederick, Robin.”

“I learned it from Mr. John,” was the reply.  “When he come back I saw him; I knew it was him; and I got a gun and watched for him.  I meant to take my revenge, sir.  Roy, he found me out; and in a night or two, he brought me face to face with Mr. John, and Mr. John he told me the truth.  But he’d only tell it me upon my giving him my promise not to expose his brother.  So I’m balked even of that revenge.  I had always counted on the exposing of the man,” added Robin in a dreamy tone, as if he were looking back into the past; “when I thought it was Mr. John, I only waited for Luke Roy to come home, that I might expose him.  I judged that Luke, being so much with him in Australia, might have heard a slip word drop as would confirm it.  Somehow, though I thought Dolly Stubbs spoke truth, I didn’t feel so sure of her as to noise it abroad.”

“You say it was Mr. John Massingbird who told you it was his brother?”

“He told me, sir.  He told me at Roy’s, when he was a-hiding there.  When the folks here was going mad about the ghost, I knowed who the ghost was, and had my laugh at ’em.  It seemed that I could laugh then,” added Robin, looking at Mr. Verner, as if he deemed an apology for the words necessary.  “My mind was set at rest.”

Did a thought cross Lionel Verner that John Massingbird, finding his own life in peril from Robin’s violence, had thrown the blame upon his brother falsely?  It might have done so, but for his own deeply-rooted suspicions.  That John would not be scrupulously regardful of truth, he believed, where his own turn was to be served.  Lionel, at any rate, felt that he should like, for his own satisfaction, to have the matter set at rest, and he took his way to Verner’s Pride.