I laughed. “It’s all quite simple,” I said. “Marley Court is where my grandfather lives. He quarrelled with my father—you may have heard him speak of it. You are a daughter of my father’s younger brother. I heard of you as a baby once in days long back. We are first cousins. Isn’t it ridiculous and melodramatic?”
After that there was a long hour’s talk. My cousin’s memory had come back as suddenly as it had gone. This, I was told afterwards, is not unusual. She could tell me a good deal about my grandfather. One sentence stuck in my memory, “He’s not violent any more.” Cynthia had lived with him since her parents’ death. I was calling her Cynthia before the end of that hour’s talk, when I reproached myself for keeping her awake too long and insisted on leaving her. Her joy at recovering her memory was pathetic, and her intense gratitude to myself was absurd.
“Suppose,” she said, “that I had not asked you for your name?”
“Well,” I said, “aren’t your things marked?”
She shook her head.
“Only initials.”
“And the bag?” I asked.
We hunted up the bag. It contained the return half of her ticket, a handkerchief, and a purse with four shillings and sixpence in it, but nothing by which I could certainly have identified her. She could remember now why she had come to London; it was an old and unimportant engagement with a dressmaker. It had been cancelled in consequence of her health. She could not remember going to the station. From that point until she met me everything was like a forgotten dream.
There were advertisements in every paper next morning—discreet advertisements with no name given. I put her into the train, and spoke to the guard about her. I might have travelled with her, but I did not wish to meet grandpapa. I had not forgotten the letter he wrote to me when my father died.
I did meet him in the end. One has to forgive one’s own flesh and blood. The letter which he sent to me was pathetic in its senile shakiness and absolutely right. He could not begin to thank me, so he said, for what I had done for Cynthia; all he wanted was to say he was sorry and ashamed. He would have liked to be friends with me before he died, but he supposed that was impossible. He would have liked also to have been of service to me, but from what he heard I no longer needed his help and was too proud to take it in any case. “Otherwise I should have liked a chance to have made up to you a very little for my obstinate cruelty to your father.”