“I can throw no light at all,” she said.  “It has come like a thunderbolt and I still find my mind refusing to accept the story that they have brought to me.  I cannot think about it—­I cannot bear to think about it; and if I believed it, I should go mad.  My husband is my life.”

“Sit down and give me some account of yourself and Mr. Pendean.  You cannot have been married very long.”

“Four years.”

He showed astonishment.

“I am twenty-five,” she explained, “though I’m told I do not look so much as that.”

“Indeed not; I should have guessed eighteen.  Collect your thoughts now and just give me what of your history and your husband’s you think most likely to be of use.”

She did not speak for a moment and Brendon, taking a chair, drew it up and sat with his arms upon the back of it facing her in a casual and easy position.  He wanted her to feel quite unconstrained.

“Just chat, as though you were talking of the past to a friend,” he said.  “Indeed you must believe that you are talking to a friend, who has no desire but to serve you.”

“I’ll begin at the beginning,” she answered.  “My own history is brief enough and has surely little bearing on this dreadful thing; but my relations may be more interesting to you than I am.  The family is now a very small one and seems likely to remain so, for of my three uncles all are bachelors.  I have no other blood relations in Europe and know nothing of some distant cousins who live in Australia.

“The story of my family is this:  John Redmayne lived his life on the Murray River in Victoria, South Australia, and there he made a considerable fortune out of sheep.  He married and had a large family.  Out of seven sons and five daughters born to them during a period of twenty years, Jenny and John Redmayne only saw five of their children grow into adult health and strength.  Four boys lived, the rest died young; though two were drowned in a boating accident and my Aunt Mary, their eldest daughter, lived a year after her marriage.

“There remained four sons:  Henry, the eldest, Albert, Bendigo, and Robert, the youngest of the family, now a man of thirty-five.  It is he you are seeking in this awful thing that is thought to have happened.

“Henry Redmayne was his father’s representative in England and a wool broker on his own account.  He married and had one daughter:  myself.  I remember my parents very well, for I was fifteen and at school when they died.  They were on their way to Australia, so that my father might see his father and mother again after the lapse of many years.  But their ship, The Wattle Blossom, was lost with all hands and I became an orphan.