She didn’t repose much faith in those striking synchronizations which apparently unrelated influences sometimes effect with related events, and which we are accustomed to term coincidences.  She distrusted their specious seeming of spontaneity, she suspected a deep design behind them all.

For example:  Up to the moment of her flight from the Cafe des Exiles there had been, as Sofia saw it, nothing extraordinary or inexplicable in the chapter of happenings which had made her acquainted, as abruptly as tardily, with certain facts concerning her parentage.

You might, if you felt like it, call it a strange coincidence that she should have read the advertisement of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher just before their letter was delivered and Mama Therese by her intemperate conduct warmed Sofia’s simmering suspicions to the boiling point.  But then Sofia read the Agony Column every time it came into her hands:  she would have been more surprised had she missed noticing her given name in print, and downright ashamed of herself if she had failed to associate the letter with the advertisement.

If you asked her, she called it Fate, the foreordained workings of occult forces charged with dominion over human affairs.  Sooner or later she must somehow have learned the truth about her right place in the world; and to her way of thinking it was no more astonishing that she should have learned it through accident supplemented by the acute inferences of a sharply stimulated imagination, rather than through being waited upon by a delegation of legal gentlemen commissioned with the duty of enlightening her.  And the colossal set-piece of the evening having been duly exploded, no sequel whatever could expect anything better than relegation to the cheerless limbo of anticlimax.

Thus when young Mr. Karslake explained his uninvited if timely intervention by stating that he was conducting her to the parent of whose existence she had so recently been informed, he succeeded—­not to put too fine a point upon it—­only in making it all seem a bit thick.

So for the time being Sofia contented herself with silent study of his face as fitfully revealed by the passing lights of Shaftesbury Avenue.

A nice face (she thought) open and naive, perhaps a trace too much so; but, viewed at close quarters, by no means so child-like as she had thought it, and by no means wanting in evidences of quiet strength if one forgave the funny little moustache which (now one came to, observe it seriously) was precisely what lent that possibly deceptive look of innocence and inconsequence, positively weakening the character of what might otherwise have been a countenance to foster confidence.

As for Mr. Karslake, he endured this candid scrutiny with a faintly apprehensive smile, but volunteered nothing more; so that, when the silence in time acquired an accent of constraint, it was Sofia who had to break it, not Mr. Karslake.