The scrap of paper purporting to be a copy of the marriage certificate, and the clergyman's pretended letter, were mere forgeries, having about them no evidence or probability of truth.

Any one could have written them.

As to that envelope addressed to Mrs.Caldigate, with the Sydney postmark, he had his own theory.

He thought but little of the intercourse which his son acknowledged with the woman, but was of opinion that his son 'had been an ass' in writing those words.

But a man does not marry a woman by simply writing his own name with the word mistress prefixed to it on an envelope.