[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 circumstances. 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?"