"The little drawer on the left. No, the one above that. There's a cutting from a newspaper."
Cynthia found in the drawer half a column of a Spanish newspaper. The name was on the top of the column. It was a paper published in Buenos Ayres. She brought the cutting back to the bed and placed it between his fingers.
"Yes, that's it," he said, and he lay back upon his pillows, and gathered his strength. "I have got to tell you now something which we have always kept a secret from you."
"There is no need to tell it," said Cynthia.
Robert Daventry stared at her.
"If you do know it," he said slowly, "we have made the cruellest mistake we could possibly have made. You can't know it!"
"It's about James Challoner--my father?" asked Cynthia, and Robert Daventry shut his eyes with a look of great distress upon his face.
"How long have you known?" he asked.
"From the night when he came to the estancia," she answered. And she told how she had slipped into the smoking-room and how, huddled in the great chair, she had heard all that James Challoner proposed for her. The shadow deepened upon Daventry's face as he listened, and when she had ended he asked with deep regret:
"Why didn't you tell us this, Cynthia?"