very well off, almost rich. After a
very few years of grass-widowhood, she married again, without much
scruple or compunction, which proves that she never thought that her
English husband would come back to her. And then came the
catastrophe."

"What catastrophe?"

"The destruction of St. Pierre. You remember the awful accounts of it.
The whole town was destroyed. Every building in the place--the local
bank, the church, the presbytery, the post-office--was burned to the
ground; everything was devastated for miles around. And thousands
perished, of course."

"I remember."

"Mrs. de Mountford and her son Philip were amongst the very few who
escaped. Their cottage was burned to the ground, but she, with all a
Frenchwoman's sense of respect for papers and marks of identification,
fought her way back into the house, even when it was tottering above
her head, in order to rescue those things which she valued more than
her life, the proofs that she was a respectable married woman and that
Philip was her lawfully begotten son. Her second husband--I think from
reading between the lines that he was a native or at best a
half-caste--was one of the many who perished. But Mrs. de Mountford
and Philip managed to reach the coast unhurt and to put out to sea in
an open boat. They were picked up by a fishing smack from Marie
Galante and landed there. It is a small island--French settlement, of
course--off Guadeloupe. They had little or no money, and how they
lived I don't know, but they stayed in Marie Galante for some time.
Then the mother died, and Philip made his way somehow or other to
Roseau in Dominica and thence to St. Vincent."

"When was that?"

"Last year I suppose."

"And," she said, meditating on all that she had heard, "it was in St.
Vincent that he first realized who he was--or might be?"

"Well, in a British colony it was bound to happen. Whether somebody
put him up to it out there, or whether he merely sucked the
information in from nowhere in particular, I can't say: certain it is
that he did soon discover that the name he bore was one of the best
known in England, and that his father must, as a matter of fact, have
been own brother to the earl of Radclyffe. So he wrote to Uncle Rad."

Louisa was silent. She was absorbed in thought and for the moment Luke
had come to the end of what he had to say--or, rather, of what he
meant to say just now. That there was more to come, Louisa well knew.
Commonplace women