Up to some thirty years ago there was an old parish church away in the loneliest part of the Cheviots which had served a village that gradually went out of existence--though it's still got a name, Walholm, there's but a house or two in it now; and as there was next to no congregation, and the church itself was becoming ruinous, the old parish was abolished, and merged in the neighbouring parish of Felside, whose rector, my friend Mr.Longfield, has the old Walholm registers in his possession.

When he read of the Phillips inquest, and what I'd said then, he thought of those registers and turned them up, out of a chest where they'd lain for thirty years anyway; and he at once found the entry of the marriage of one Michael Carstairs with a Mary Smeaton, which was by licence, and performed by the last vicar of Walholm--it was, as a matter of fact, the very last marriage which ever took place in the old church.
And I should say," concluded Mr.Ridley, "that it was what one would call a secret wedding--secret, at any rate, in so far as this: as it was by licence, and as the old church was a most lonely and isolated place, far away from anywhere, even then there'd be no one to know of it beyond the officiating clergyman and the witnesses, who could, of course, be asked to hold their tongues about the matter, as they probably were.

But there's the copy of the entry in the old register." Smeaton and I looked eagerly over the slip of paper which Mr.Ridley handed across.

And he, to whom it meant such a vast deal, asked but one question: "I wonder if I can find out anything about Mary Smeaton!" "Mr.Longfield has already made some quiet inquiries amongst two or three old people of the neighbourhood on that point," remarked Mr.Ridley.

"The two witnesses to the marriage are both dead--years ago.