With this parting shot she turned to Sir Miles again, and held out her hand.

“Tell your man he needn’t trouble about a seat for you.  I’ve engaged a compartment where we can talk.”

“Well?” he asked, ten minutes later, lowering his newspaper as the train drew out of the station.

“Well, in the first place, it’s very good of you to come.”

“Oh, as for that . . .  You know that if I can ever do you any service—­”

“But you can’t.  It was for your own sake I telegraphed.”

“Mine?  Is Meriton really burnt to the ground, then?  But even that news wouldn’t gravely afflict me.”

“It isn’t—­and it would.  At any rate, it might now, I hope,” said Miss Sally enigmatically.

He waited for her to continue.

“Your wife’s dead!” she said.

She heard him draw a quick breath.

“Indeed?” he asked indifferently.

“But your son isn’t—­at least, I hope not.”

He looked up and met her eyes.

“But I had word,” he said slowly, “word from her, and in her own handwriting.  A boy was born, and died six or seven weeks later—­as I remember, the letter said within a week after his christening.”

Miss Sally nodded.

“That settles it,” she said; “being untrue, as I happen to know.  The child was alive and hearty a year after the christening, when they left Cawsand and moved to the East coast.  The fact is, my friend, you had run up—­if not in your wife, then in the coastguardsman Ned Commins—­against a pride as stubborn as your own.  They wrote you a lie—­that’s certain; and I’m as hard as most upon liars; but, considering all, I don’t blame ’em.  They weren’t mercenary, anyway.  They only wanted to have no more truck with you.”

“Have you seen the boy?”

Again Miss Sally nodded.

“Yes, and there’s no doubting the parentage.  I never saw that cross-hatched under-lip in any but a Chandon, though you do hide it with a beard:  let alone that he carries the four lozenges tattooed on his shoulder.  Ned Commins did that.  There was a moment, belike, when they weakened—­either he or the woman.  But you had best hear the story, and then you can judge the evidence for yourself.”

She told it.  He listened with set face, interposing here and there to ask a question, or to weigh one detail of her narrative against another.

“If the children should be lost—­which God forbid!” she wound up, “—­and if I never did another good day’s work in my life, I’ll remember that they started me to clear that infernal Orphanage.  It’s by the interposition of Heaven that you didn’t find me on Paddington platform with three-and-twenty children under my wing.  ’Interposition of Heaven,’ did I say?  You may call it, if you will, the constant and consistent foolishness of my brother Elphinstone.  In every tight corner of my life I’ve learnt to trust in Elphinstone