"Mr. Lance has been telling me the most wonderful things!" said Jessie to her father, as they sat at table. "All about flowers and legends and ghosts."
She was holding up a cup at that instant, for the servant to take, and the colonel noticed the sparkle of the new ring on her hand. His eyes threw back an answering sparkle; he gazed fondly at his daughter for an instant, and then, with forgiving kindness, at Lance.
"Miss Jessie refers to an old family history," the young man hastily explained. "I mean the Wyldes and Whartons. It wouldn't seem so wonderful to you, sir."
The colonel threw himself back in his chair, with raised eyebrows. "The Wyldes!" he exclaimed. "You never told me you knew my family history. How does it happen? Or is it, perhaps, only a coincidence of name? By George, it strikes me as very wonderful!"
As Lance, in his turn, showed equal astonishment, it became necessary for him to ask questions; and, by a rapid interchange of replies, they arrived at an extraordinary revelation. The colonel raked out from his library a dingy and ruinous old "family tree," by which ocular demonstration was given of his descent from a branch of the identical Surrey Wyldes that the Gertrude of Lance's story belonged to. Puzzling out the different lines on the old diagram, which represented a trunk and branches, with here and there a big circle like some impossible fruit or an abnormal knot in the wood of the "tree"—the said knots or circles representing fathers of families—they ascertained that the Miss Wylde whose life-current had long ago blended with that of the Floyds was a first cousin of Gertrude Wylde, who had been Guy Wharton's lady-love.
The colonel glowed with interest and enthusiasm. "I never came upon anything more thrilling," he declared, roundly.
"But you never said a word about the Wyldes," said Jessie, to Lance. "If you had, I could have told you there was some connection between us and them."
"I didn't think of it," he assured her, "because there was a sort of doubt in my mind whether the girl was English or an Indian—as I told you. But I knew the name of Wylde was mixed up with the affair, anyhow; and the more I reflect upon it, the more clearly it comes back to me that Gertrude Wylde was the woman whom Guy Wharton came to this country to find, and who was lost here."
They referred once more to the "family tree," and detected there, surely enough, a small branch terminating suddenly with the names of Matthew Wylde and his daughter Gertrude, accompanied by the inscription: "Emigrated to America, 1587."
The colonel, much excited, now brought forth a faded tome devoted to the history of North Carolina. Turning its pages, he unearthed the record of Raleigh's expedition and the search-party that came after it. But the names of the emigrants, of course, were not given.