pervious to
woman's wiles, he may have been moved by this unspoken appeal. He
certainly seemed struck by something, for even as her back was turning
towards him, he said suddenly, and in a distinctly different voice:

"You say you can guess yourself?"

She nodded, and added with a pathetic coaxing note in her low voice:

"But I want to _know_!"

"Supposing," he suggested, "you were to tell me precisely how much you
do know already, and then I could judge whether the rest might or might
not be divulged."

Her face brightened and she returned to her chair with a promptitude
that suggested she was not unaccustomed to win a lost battle with these
weapons.

"Well," she said, "it was only six months ago--when mother died--that I
first had the least suspicion there was any mystery about me--anything
to hide. I knew she hadn't always been happy and that her trouble had
something to do with my father, simply because she hardly ever mentioned
him. But she lived at Eastbourne just like plenty of other widows and we
had a few friends, though never very many, and I was very happy at
school, and so I never troubled much about things."

"And knew nothing up till six months ago?" asked Simon, who was
following her story very attentively.

"Nothing at all. Then, about a month after mother's death, I got a note
from you asking me to go up to London and meet Sir Reginald Cromarty. I
had never even heard of him before! Well, I went and he was simply as
kind as--well, as he always is to everybody, and said he was a kind of
connection of my family and asked me to pay them a long visit to
Keldale."

"How long ago precisely was that?"

She looked a little surprised.

"Oh, you know exactly. Almost just four months ago, wasn't it?"

He nodded, but said nothing, and she went on:

"From the very first it had seemed very strange that I had never heard a
word about the Cromartys from mother, and as soon as I got to Keldale
and met Lady Cromarty, I felt sure there was something wrong. I mean
that I wasn't an ordinary distant relation. For one thing they never
spoke of our relationship and exactly what sort of cousins we were, and
considering how keen Sir Reginald is on his pedigree and all his
relations and everybody, that alone made me certain I wasn't the
ordinary kind. That was obvious, wasn't it?"

"It seems so," the lawyer admitted cautiously.

"Of course it was! Well, one day I happened to be looking over an old
photograph a