rottle! you
spoke that word 'burial' in a very strange way--you are fixing your eyes
on me now with a very strange look--"

Trottle leaned over close to me, and pointed through the window to the
empty house.

"The child's death is registered, at Pendlebury," he said, "on Barsham's
certificate, under the head of Male Infant, Still-Born. The child's
coffin lies in the mother's grave, in Flatfield churchyard. The child
himself--as surely as I live and breathe, is living and breathing now--a
castaway and a prisoner in that villainous house!"

I sank back in my chair.

"It's guess-work, so far, but it is borne in on my mind, for all that, as
truth. Rouse yourself, ma'am, and think a little. The last I hear of
Barsham, he is attending Mr. Forley's disobedient daughter. The next I
see of Barsham, he is in Mr. Forley's house, trusted with a secret. He
and his mother leave Pendlebury suddenly and suspiciously five years
back; and he and his mother have got a child of five years old, hidden
away in the house. Wait! please to wait--I have not done yet. The will
left by Mr. Forley's father, strengthens the suspicion. The friend I
took with me to Doctors' Commons, made himself master of the contents of
that will; and when he had done so, I put these two questions to him.
'Can Mr. Forley leave his money at his own discretion to anybody he
pleases?' 'No,' my friend says, 'his father has left him with only a
life interest in it.' 'Suppose one of Mr. Forley's married daughters has
a girl, and the other a boy, how would the money go?' 'It would all go,'
my friend says, 'to the boy, and it would be charged with the payment of
a certain annual income to his female cousin. After her death, it would
go back to the male descendant, and to his heirs.' Consider that, ma'am!
The child of the daughter whom Mr. Forley hates, whose husband has been
snatched away from his vengeance by death, takes his whole property in
defiance of him; and the child of the daughter whom he loves, is left a
pensioner on her low-born boy-cousin for life! There was good--too good
reason--why that child of Mrs. Kirkland's should be registered stillborn.
And if, as I believe, the register is founded on a false certificate,
there is better, still better reason, why the existence of the child
should be hidden, and all trace of his parentage blotted out, in the
garret of that empty house."

He stopped, and pointed for the second time to the dim, dust-cov