"Now, my boy," said Mr. Spranger, who was a hale, jovial Englishman, on whom neither climate nor exile had any depressing influence, and who, besides, was delighted to have as his guest a young man who, as well as being a gentleman, could furnish him with some news of that far-off world from which he expected to be separated for still some years. "Now, help yourself to some more claret--it is quite sound and wholesome--and let me see what I can do for you."
"It will take some time in the telling," Julian said. "It is a long story and a strange one."
"It may take till midnight, if you choose," the other answered. "We sit up late in this country, so as to profit by the coolest hours of the day."
"But--Miss Spranger. Will she not think me very rude to detain you so long?"
"No," he replied. "If we do not join her soon, she will understand that our conversation is of importance."
It was nearly midnight when Julian had concluded the whole of his narrative, he telling Mr. Spranger everything that had occurred from the time when George Ritherdon had unfolded that strange story in his Surrey home, until the hour when he himself had arrived at the house in which he now was, with his arm bandaged up and his head dressed.
Of course there had been interruptions to the flow of the narrative. Once they had gone out onto the lawn to bid Beatrix good-night and to chat with her for a few moments during which Julian had been amply apologetic for preventing her father from joining her, as well as for not doing so himself--and, naturally, Mr. Spranger had himself interrupted the course of the recital by exclamations of astonishment and with many questions.
But that recital was finished now, and still the elder man's bewilderment was extreme.
"It is the most extraordinary story I ever heard in my life! A romance. And it seems such a tangled web! How, in Heaven's name, can your father's, or uncle's, account be the right one?"
"You do not believe his story?" Julian asked; "you believe Sebastian is, in absolute fact, Charles Ritherdon's son?"