Judge Bramber never opened his mouth upon the matter to a single human being.  He was a man who, in the bosom of his family, did not say much about the daily work of his life, and who had but few friends sufficiently intimate to be trusted with his judicial feelings.  The Secretary of State was enabled to triumph in the correctness of his decision, but it may be a question whether Judge Bramber enjoyed the triumph.  The matter had gone luckily for the Secretary; but how would it have been had Crinkett and the woman been acquitted?—­how would it have been had Caldigate broken down in his evidence, and been forced to admit that there had been a marriage of some kind?  No doubt the accusation had been false.  No doubt the verdict had been erroneous.  But the man had brought it upon himself by his own egregious folly, and would have had no just cause for complaint had he been kept in prison till the second case had been tried.  It was thus that Judge Bramber regarded the matter;—­but he said not a word about it to any one.

When the second trial was over, Caldigate and his wife started for Paris, but stayed a few days on their way with William Bolton in London.  He and his wife were quite ready to receive Hester and her husband with open arms.  ‘I tell you fairly,’ said he to Caldigate, ’that when there was a doubt, I thought it better that you and Hester should be apart.  You would have thought the same had she been your sister.  Now I am only too happy to congratulate both of you that the truth has been brought to light.’

On their return Mrs. Robert Bolton was very friendly,—­and Robert Bolton himself was at last brought round to acknowledge that his convictions had been wrong.  But there was still much that stuck in his throat.  ’Why did John Caldigate pay twenty thousand pounds to those persons when he knew that they had hatched a conspiracy against himself?’ This question he asked his brother William over and over again, and never could be satisfied with any answer which his brother could give him.

Once he asked the question of Caldigate himself.  ’Because I felt that, in honour, I owed it to them,’ said Caldigate; ’and, perhaps, a little too because I felt that, if they took themselves off at once, your sister might be spared something of the pain which she has suffered.’  But still it was unintelligible to Robert Bolton that any man in his senses should give away so large a sum of money with so slight a prospect of any substantial return.

Hester often goes to see her mother, but Mrs. Bolton has never been at Folking, and probably never will again visit that house.  She is a woman whose heart is not capable of many changes, and who cannot readily give herself to new affections.  But having once owned that John Caldigate is her daughter’s husband, she now alleges no further doubt on the matter.  She writes the words ‘Mrs. John Caldigate’ without a struggle, and does take delight in her daughter’s visits.