“They were both London people, I suppose,” he said, looking hard at Christina Alberta.
“Woodford Wells,” said Christina Alberta.
“My father was born at Sheringham,” she added as an afterthought.
“Sheringham. That’s queer.” With a manifestly deepened interest he looked at the couple posed against one of those rustic backgrounds dear to Victorian photographers. “Chrissy,” he repeated to himself. “Chrissy. Christina Alberta. It can’t be.”
For some moments Dr. Devizes ceased to attend to his consultants and they remained intently observing him. He tried to fix his attention on the young man’s face in the picture, but it was the young woman who sat on the rustic style that absorbed his interest. Amazing how completely he had forgotten her face, and how she came back now incredibly unlike and yet like his memory of her. He remembered the glasses and the neck and shoulders. And a sort of stiff defiance. “When were your mother and father married?” he asked. “How long ago?”
“Eighteen ninety-nine,” she answered.
“And then you were born straight away?” He asked the question with an affectation of ease.
“There was a decent interval,” said Christina Alberta with a clumsy levity. “I was born in nineteen hundred.”
“A little, fair, blue-eyed chap with rather an absent-minded manner. I seem to see him,” Devizes said, and resumed his examination of the photograph. Nobody spoke for the better part of a minute. “Good Lord!” whispered Lambone to himself. Devizes drank a cup of tea absent-mindedly. “Extraordinary,” he ejaculated. “I never dreamt of it.”
“What is?”