"But she may be alive still," interrupted the child.
"Oh no, darling. Quite impossible. She was never heard of again, and it was nearly thirty years ago."
"Don't ramble. You are wandering off again. How could it be thirty years ago, when I'm only just eighteen?"
Weevil admitted the difficulty, and replied that he had been thinking just then of his wife. She would keep mixing herself up with the girl's mother.
"Now I'm getting at it," said Boodles, with a kind of fierce seriousness. "My mother is supposed to be dead. My father is in British Honduras—"
"British Guiana," corrected Weevil.
"Are you sure?"
"Almost certain. I looked it up on the map. I wish I had that piece of paper," the poor old man muttered.
"Well, it does not matter much for the present. You say my mother was Miss Lascelles, and my father was Canon Lascelles; but if my mother was your daughter her name would have been Weevil."
"So it was, my dear," he cried, with a new inspiration, "at least it would have been if—if—I mean, darling, my name is really Lascelles, only I changed it to Weevil when I lost my fortune."