“Let me tell you, please.... He did know my mother.”
“I supposed so.”
“Yes. He was the man. I want you to know what he told me.... I always wish you to know everything that is in my—mind—always, for ever.”
She leaned forward in her chair, her pretty, bare feet extended. One silken sleeve of her negligée had fallen to the shoulder, revealing the perfect symmetry of her arm. But he put from his mind the ever latent artistic delight in her, closed his painter’s eye to her 333 protean possibilities, and resolutely concentrated his mental forces upon what she was now saying:
“He turns out to be the same man my mother wrote to—and who wrote to her.... They were in love, then. He didn’t say why he went away, except that my mother’s family disliked him.... She lived at a house called Fane Court.... He spoke of my mother’s father as Sir Barry Fane....”
“That doesn’t surprise me, Sweetness.”
“Did you know?”
“Nothing definite.” He looked at the lovely, slender-limbed girl there in the starry dusk. “I knew nothing definite,” he repeated, “but there was no mistaking the metal from which you had been made—or the mould, either. And as for Soane——” he smiled.
She said:
“If my name is really Fane, there can be only one conclusion; some kinsman of that name must have married my mother.”