’She recovered, rested there for an hour, and first sending off her companion peremptorily (which was another odd thing), she left the house, offering the landlord all the money she had to say nothing about the circumstance.  He has never seen her since, according to his own account.  I said to him again and again, “Did you find any more particulars afterwards?” “Not a syllable,” he said.  O, he should never hear any more of that! too many years had passed since it happened.  “At any rate, you found out her surname?” I said.  “Well, well, that’s my secret,” he went on.  “Perhaps I should never have been in this part of the world if it hadn’t been for that.  I failed as a publican, you know.”  I imagine the situation of gateman was given him and his debts paid off as a bribe to silence; but I can’t say.  “Ah, yes!” he said, with a long breath.  “I have never heard that name mentioned since that time till to-night, and then there instantly rose to my eyes the vision of that young lady lying in a fainting fit.”  He then stopped talking and fell asleep.  Telling the story must have relieved him as it did the Ancient Mariner, for he did not move a muscle or make another sound for the remainder of the night.  Now isn’t that an odd story?’

‘It is indeed,’ Cytherea murmured.  ‘Very, very strange.’

‘Why should she have said your most uncommon name?’ continued Owen.  ’The man was evidently truthful, for there was not motive sufficient for his invention of such a tale, and he could not have done it either.’

Cytherea looked long at her brother.  ’Don’t you recognize anything else in connection with the story?’ she said.

‘What?’ he asked.

’Do you remember what poor papa once let drop—­that Cytherea was the name of his first sweetheart in Bloomsbury, who so mysteriously renounced him?  A sort of intuition tells me that this was the same woman.’

‘O no—­not likely,’ said her brother sceptically.

’How not likely, Owen?  There’s not another woman of the name in England.  In what year used papa to say the event took place?’

‘Eighteen hundred and thirty-five.’

’And when were the Houses of Parliament burnt?—­stop, I can tell you.’  She searched their little stock of books for a list of dates, and found one in an old school history.

’The Houses of Parliament were burnt down in the evening of the sixteenth of October, eighteen hundred and thirty-four.’

‘Nearly a year and a quarter before she met father,’ remarked Owen.

They were silent.  ’If papa had been alive, what a wonderful absorbing interest this story would have had for him,’ said Cytherea by-and-by.  ’And how strangely knowledge comes to us.  We might have searched for a clue to her secret half the world over, and never found one.  If we had really had any motive for trying to discover more of the sad history than papa told us, we should have gone to Bloomsbury; but not caring to do so, we go two hundred miles in the opposite direction, and there find information waiting to be told us.  What could have been the secret, Owen?’