"It depends--" said Cynthia warily.

"Very well then. Tell me another thing. Why does your portrait hang in this house?"

Cynthia's cheeks flamed. She looked swiftly across Devenish at Colonel Challoner. But he was giving no heed to them.

"Do you think it's like me?" she asked.

"It _is_ you," he replied.

"No one else has noticed the resemblance all this week," said Cynthia.

Mr. Devenish glanced along the table.

"Well, look at 'em," he said contemptuously, and they both laughed.

Lady Lorme rose at that moment from the table, and Mr. Devenish, pleading the distance he had to travel, took his departure.

"I have enjoyed myself very much, Challoner," he said as the colonel came out with him to-the doorway. "I can't tell you how glad I am that I thought of dropping in upon you for luncheon. I am going back to London now. Good-by."

He mounted into his car and drove gaily off. In the dining-room behind him, the sandy-haired man was saying over and over again to the dismayed conspirators--

"He'll sell us a pup. He'll sell us a pup. I'll bet you a monkey, he'll sell us a pup."

That night, when the men went upstairs, Rames pa.s.sing from his dressing-room into his wife's bedroom found her still up and sitting by her fire.

"We go back to-morrow, Cynthia. It has been a long week. I hope you haven't been bored."

"No," she said. "I haven't."

"What do you think of them? Will they run away when the fight comes?"

"Not all," said Cynthia. "But even of those who stay with you, there's not one who is a match for Mr. Devenish."

She spoke with some warmth in her voice.

"You like him?" said Harry Rames.

"I think he's a big man," she replied.

Rames, who was standing looking into her mirror, suddenly swung round.

"Shall I tell you why you say that, Cynthia?"

"Yes."

"Because he's the only man except myself who has noticed your likeness to that very pretty girl on the wall of the dining-room. I heard him mention it to you at luncheon."

He burst out into a laugh as he spoke; and in a moment or two Cynthia joined in the laugh. So Harry Rames too had noticed the resemblance.

She laughed and her eyes laughed with her lips.

"After all," said Harry Rames, "we get some fun out of it, don't we, Cynthia?"

"Yes," said Cynthia and her laughter died away. "We get some fun out of it, Harry. That's just what we do get"; and her eyes turned away from him to the fire.

CHAPTER XXVII

DEVENISH REPLIES

Captain Rames had arranged to travel by a train which ran directly into Warwickshire through the outskirts of London. It left Wareham at mid-day, some two hours later than the fast London trains, and though Cynthia had wished to escape in all the hurry of the general departure, she had found no sufficient reason. She and her husband were thus the last of that company at Bramling, and when all but they had gone, Colonel Challoner turned from the front door whence he had been speeding his guests, and invited her to walk with him in the garden. Cynthia in a flurry began to search for excuses, and before she found one realized that the moment for excuses had already gone.

She turned and walked with Colonel Challoner into the red-walled garden where his fruit and flowers grew. The half-hour which ever since the first evening at Bramling she had intended to avoid was, after all, upon her.

"There is not very much to see now, Mrs. Rames," said the colonel, and without any change of voice he added, "I learnt just before the session ended that you had come from South America."

"From the Argentine," said Cynthia.

"But you are English-born, of course?"

"Oh, yes, of course," said Cynthia. "But I never came to England until five years ago. I was brought up partly in Buenos Ayres and partly on the Daventry estancia two hundred miles to the south-west of Buenos Ayres. My name was Cynthia Daventry."

Cynthia rattled off her story to spare herself his questions, and for a few minutes he walked by her side in silence. But he was not altogether to be deterred.

"I had a son in South America," he continued. "He went out under--rather unhappy circ.u.mstances. He took a young wife with him.

She ran away to join him. They went to Chile. There a daughter was born--my granddaughter."

"On the other side of the Andes," said Cynthia.

"Yes," said Colonel Challoner. "You were never in Chile, I suppose?"

Cynthia answered without any hesitation and in a voice schooled perfectly to indifference.

"Oh, yes, once. I have seen Valparaiso."

Colonel Challoner was deceived by her indifference. To him, with the particular intention of his question filling his mind, it was as though she had said she had never been in Valparaiso at all.

"I knew nothing of what my boy was doing, Mrs. Rames," he continued, "nor that he had a daughter. He left England under a cloud. I gave him what money I could afford and--I had done with him. Perhaps I was harsh--I did not think that I was. But--well, it's not so easy to have done with people when they are your own flesh and blood, and after a time I began to make inquiries. I heard of the daughter then."

"Yes?" said Cynthia. She looked up into his face inquiringly. She had dreaded this half-hour of acting lest the changes of color in her face, and the unevenness of her voice, should betray her. Yet now that the half-hour was here she played her part with ease.

"I heard that Jim and his wife and his child had all perished in one of the earthquakes, eighteen years ago. And there was I, you see, alone again, but alone for life now."

"I am sorry," said Cynthia.

"But the news was wrong," the old man continued with a sudden violence. "My son--died," and he plainly subst.i.tuted that verb for another, "only five years ago. I received a cutting from a newspaper.

I sent out again at once to South America a man whom I could trust; and I discovered that Jim was not killed by the earthquake, nor was his daughter. He carried her up the valley toward the Andes--tramped away, since Valparaiso was ruined, with his daughter in his arms. He wouldn't leave her behind. No, he must have carried her across the Continent. There was good in Jim, after all, you see--only I, his father hadn't the sense to see it."