A quiet, elderly man leaned over the table.
"Did you notice the flag upon the chairman's table, Captain Rames?" he asked. "It was woven out of Ludsey silk fifty years ago. It's the true Ludsey blue. My father wove it for Sir William Harris's first election, and the other fellows swore they would have it on the polling-day. But we carried it about the streets from morning to evening, with twelve big fellows to protect it. It was nearly down once, I remember. I was a lad at the time--at the corner of Stapley's Lane. But we saved it and it was your table-cloth to-night, Captain Rames. It brought us victory then. It will again to-morrow."
The stories were continued. They were often not very pointed; often enough the humor was far to seek; but they were alive. They were told with infinite enjoyment, and the smallest details were remembered over decades. Cynthia began now to listen to them for their own sake; she was learning with surprise the value of politics to the lives of men in a busy city of the provinces. But the colonel at her elbow was not longer to be diverted.
"I think it must have been in Dorsetshire that we met," he said. "I live near to Wareham."
Cynthia looked at him quite steadily.
"I have never been in Dorsetshire in my life, Colonel Challoner."
"Yet I associate you with that county," he persisted. "Now, why should I do that, Miss Daventry? You have not been to my house, I know. For since my wife died and my son went away, I have not had so many young people to stay with me as I should have liked."
From the moment when Colonel Challoner had claimed her recognition, Cynthia had not doubted that she was sitting next to a relation. And Colonel Challoner's location of his home in Dorsetshire, near to Wareham, had confirmed her belief. She knew quite well how it came about that he had seemed to recognize her, that he associated her with his own parish. She knew because upon one unforgettable night she had crouched in a great chair in a dark room and through the panels of a door had heard her father claim her as his daughter. He, too, had recognized her as Colonel Challoner now did, and just by the same means. For there was a Romney hanging upon the dining-room wall in that house near Wareham which might have been a portrait of herself. But until this moment she had not guessed what degree of relationship bound her to the old man at her side.
Now, however, she knew that too. The hesitation, the gentle wistfulness with which he had spoken of his son struck home at her. She was this man's granddaughter. She was moved by what he had said. A big house empty of young people must be a place of melancholy and hollow as a shell. Yet she would not reveal herself. She had it fixed now as an instinct of her nature that she would never wear the name of Challoner, nor admit a link with any of that name.... But she turned toward her grandfather with a greater sympathy.
"You have given up your whole life to politics now?" she asked, and a wave of pity swept through her. It could not be possible that he should win any success in that sphere, and she was young and could hardly conceive of life at all without success.