As usual in such cases the woman—unmoved and businesslike—put an end to his access of shyness.
"The matter is—or may be—too serious, dear, for you to keep any of your thoughts back from me at this juncture."
"What I meant was," he said abruptly, "that this Philip might quite well be Uncle Arthur's son you know; but it doesn't follow that he has any right to call himself Philip de Mountford, or to think that he is Uncle Rad's presumptive heir."
"That will of course depend on his proofs—his papers and so on," she assented calmly. "Has any one seen them?"
"At the time—it was sometime last November—that he first wrote to Uncle Rad, he had all his papers by him. He wrote from St. Vincent; have I told you that?"
"No."
"Well, it was from St. Vincent that he wrote. He had left Martinique, I understand, in 1902, when St. Pierre, if you remember, was totally destroyed by volcanic eruption. It seems that when Uncle Arthur left the French colony for good, he lodged quite a comfortable sum in the local bank at St. Pierre in the name of Mrs. de Mountford. Of course he had no intention of ever going back there, and anyhow he never did, for he died about three years later. The lady went on living her own life quite happily. Apparently she did not hanker much after her faithless husband. I suppose that she never imagined for a moment that he meant to stick to her, and she certainly never bothered her head as to what his connections or friends over in England might be. Amongst her own kith and kin, the half-caste population of a French settlement, she was considered very well off, almost rich. After a very few years of grass-widowhood, she married again, without much scruple or compunction, which proves that she never thought that her English husband would come back to her. And then came the catastrophe."
"What catastrophe?"
"The destruction of St. Pierre. You remember the awful accounts of it. The whole town was destroyed. Every building in the place—the local bank, the church, the presbytery, the post-office—was burned to the ground; everything was devastated for miles around. And thousands perished, of course."
"I remember."