Clide made no answer to this, but turned round and faced his uncle, who still stood with his hand clenched stolidly on the mantel-piece.
“Uncle, what do you think of it?” he said hoarsely.
The admiral walked deliberately towards the sofa and sat down beside his nephew. Before he spoke he held out his horny palm, and grasped Clide’s hand tightly. The action was too significant not to convey to Clide all it was meant—perhaps unconsciously—to express.
The admiral did not believe the story to be the phantom of dotage; he believed Cromer had seen Isabel.
“My boy,” he said, speaking in a harsh, abrupt tone, as if the words were being dragged out of him, “I can say nothing until we have investigated the matter. An hour ago I would have sworn it was absurd, impossible. I would have said, with an oath, it cannot be true. I saw her laid in her coffin and buried at St. Valéry. But I might have sworn falsely. Several days had elapsed between the death and the burial; the features were swollen, scarcely recognizable. I took it perhaps too readily for granted that they were hers; I ought to have looked closer and longer; but I shrank from looking at all; I only glanced; they showed me the hair; it was the same length and apparently the same color, deep jet black; the height too corresponded. This, as well as all the collateral evidence, satisfied me at once as to the identity. It may be that I was too rash, too anxious to be convinced.”
Clide was silent for a few moments. Then he said:
“Where did the dentist live that gave us the clew before?”
“In Wimpole Street.”
Clide drew away his hand quickly from his uncle’s with a visible shudder. The coincidence had done its work with the others before he came in. An inarticulate exclamation, full of passionate emotion of some sort, broke from him.