nsophisticated comment on Louisa's last remark.

But she frowned a little at this show of levity, and continued
quietly:

"And your uncle, according to this so-called Philip de Mountford, was
married in 1881 in Martinique, his son was born in 1882, and he left
Martinique in 1883 never to return."

"Hang it all, Lou!" exclaimed the young man almost roughly, "that is
all surmise."

"I know it is, dear; I was only thinking."

"Thinking what?"

"That it all tallies so very exactly and that this--this Philip de
Mountford seems in any case to know a great deal about your Uncle
Arthur, and his movements in the past."

"There's no doubt of that; and----"

Luke paused a moment and a curious blush spread over his face. The
Englishman's inborn dislike to talk of certain subjects to his women
folk had got hold of him, and he did not know how to proceed.

As usual in such cases the woman--unmoved and businesslike--put an end
to his access of shyness.

"The matter is--or may be--too serious, dear, for you to keep any of
your thoughts back from me at this juncture."

"What I meant was," he said abruptly, "that this Philip might quite
well be Uncle Arthur's son you know; but it doesn't follow that he has
any right to call himself Philip de Mountford, or to think that he is
Uncle Rad's presumptive heir."

"That will of course depend on his proofs--his papers and so on," she
assented calmly. "Has any one seen them?"

"At the time--it was sometime last November--that he first wrote to
Uncle Rad, he had all his papers by him. He wrote from St. Vincent;
have I told you that?"

"No."

"Well, it was from St. Vincent that he wrote. He had left Martinique,
I understand, in 1902, when St. Pierre, if you remember, was totally
destroyed by volcanic eruption. It seems that when Uncle Arthur left
the French colony for good, he lodged quite a comfortable sum in the
local bank at St. Pierre in the name of Mrs. de Mountford. Of course
he had no intention of ever going back there, and anyhow he never did,
for he died about three years later. The lady went on living her own
life quite happily. Apparently she did not hanker much after her
faithless husband. I suppose that she never imagined for a moment that
he meant to stick to her, and she certainly never bothered her head as
to what his connections or friends over in England might be. Amongst
her own kith and kin, the half-caste population of a French
settlement, she was considered