CHAPTER VII
[BOTH SIDES OF THE DOOR]
Within the room the three people were standing, the reaper upon one side of the table, Joan and Robert Daventry close together upon the other. The reaper was still laughing.
"Cynthia!" he cried, repeating contemptuously the name which Robert Daventry had used. "There's no Cynthia. There's a very pretty little girl I saw this morning in the corn. But her pretty little name is Doris Challoner. And, taking all in all, it's the better name of the two."
He spoke with an easy and most disquieting assurance, but Joan had enough of that quality to meet with him in the gate. She had always been a good fighter; she had stood by her husband often enough in the early days of the estancia, when his nerve would have failed him but for her; and she was for putting up to-night the best fight of her whole long, active life. Money, to her thinking, they could make again, old as they were, if the need came. But they could not open their hearts to a second Cynthia, even if they could find one.
"Nonsense," she answered boldly. "Her name is Cynthia Daventry."
"Where was she born, then?" asked the reaper.
"In Patagonia."
"Never in this world," cried the man. "She was born in Concepcion, and that's her farthest south."
Joan shrugged her shoulders.