“This portrait was in the colonel’s father’s house, lent him to be copied, and when he fled he took the original with him, and left the copy.  It was a duel that he fought, and there was something irregular that he did about it.  He went to Virginia, you remember, and while there he changed his name.  Then he came here, and the search for him died out.  The matter was hushed up some way, I suppose.”

“And pretended that he belonged to a different race of Archdales in another part of England,” asserted Mrs. Eveleigh, contemptuously.

“Perhaps we should, too, if we had been in his place.”

“What! in his place, Elizabeth?  Can you even imagine how you would feel if you had murdered anybody, or about the same as that?”

“Yes.”

“Nonsense, my dear.  You must have a powerful imagination; I shouldn’t think it was healthy.  There’s no use, any way, in being so odd.”

“No.”

“First ‘yes,’ and then ‘no,’ and neither of them means anything.  But if you haven’t anything to say, I wish you would tell me how those people, the colonel’s father and mother, happened to have a son living that they didn’t know anything about.”

Elizabeth, full of remembrance of the time when a human life, even if her own, had seemed light to her, could not help smiling at Mrs. Eveleigh’s literal interpretation of things.  “They had to escape at once,” she said, “and the doctor said the child would die if he undertook a sea-voyage in that state.  So she sent him to her father’s home with a nurse who was very fond of him; he was a baby then.  And she went away with her husband with the understanding that when the child recovered, as the doctor expected him to do, the nurse should bring him to her in America.  And she left open some way of communication.  But, instead of the baby, there came news that he was dead.”

“And he wasn’t dead?”

“No; his grandfather adopted him, and gave him his name.  He hated Mr. Archdale; he had lost his daughter through him, and he determined to keep the child.  So he bribed the nurse to report his death, and persuaded her that it was better for the little fellow to stay with him as his sole heir than follow the fortunes of a haunted man in a wilderness, as America must have been then.”

“And do you really believe they never knew of this son of theirs being alive?”

“Mr. Archdale’s will, if nothing else, proves that.  He had three sons here, you remember; and the colonel, the eldest of these, was named Walter, after the one supposed to have died in England.  And, now, you see how this trouble all happened.  The will left the greater part of the property to Mr. Archdale’s oldest son, Walter, whom he supposed the colonel.  But the real oldest son, Walter, was this Mr. Edmonson’s father.  So that the colonel was really left penniless.”

“Yes, yes, now I see,” cried Mrs. Eveleigh.  “You are like your father when you come to explanations, Elizabeth; a person can always get at what you mean.  Now tell me about the portrait, how it came there, and how in the world Mr. Edmonson found it.”