"There is not very much to see now, Mrs. Rames," said the colonel, and without any change of voice he added, "I learnt just before the session ended that you had come from South America." "From the Argentine," said Cynthia. "But you are English-born, of course?" "Oh, yes, of course," said Cynthia. "But I never came to England until five years ago. I was brought up partly in Buenos Ayres and partly on the Daventry estancia two hundred miles to the south-west of Buenos Ayres. My name was Cynthia Daventry." Cynthia rattled off her story to spare herself his questions, and for a few minutes he walked by her side in silence. But he was not altogether to be deterred. "I had a son in South America," he continued. "He went out under--rather unhappy circumstances. He took a young wife with him. She ran away to join him. They went to Chile. There a daughter was born--my granddaughter." "On the other side of the Andes," said Cynthia. "Yes," said Colonel Challoner. "You were never in Chile, I suppose?" Cynthia answered without any hesitation and in a voice schooled perfectly to indifference. "Oh, yes, once. I have seen Valparaiso." Colonel Challoner was deceived by her indifference. To him, with the particular intention of his question filling his mind, it was as though she had said she had never been in Valparaiso at all. "I knew nothing of what my boy was doing, Mrs. Rames," he continued, "nor that he had a daughter. He left England under a cloud. I gave him what money I could afford and--I had done with him. Perhaps I was harsh--I did not think that I was. But--well, it's not so easy to have done with people when they are your own flesh and blood, and after a time I began to make inquiries. I heard of the daughter then." "Yes?" said Cynthia. She looked up into his face inquiringly. She had dreaded this half-hour of acting lest the changes of color in her face, and the unevenness of her voice, should betray her. Yet now that the half-hour was here she played her part with ease. "I heard that Jim and his wife and his child had all perished in one of the earthquakes, eighteen years ago. And there was I, you see, alone again, but alone for life now." "I am sorry," said Cynthia. "But the news was wrong," the old man continued with a sudden violence. "My son--died," and he plainly substituted that verb for another, "only five years ago. I received a cutting from a newspaper. I sent out again at once to South America a man whom I could trust; and I discovered that Jim was not killed by the earthquake, nor was his daughter. He carried her up the valley toward the Andes--tramped away, since Valparaiso was ruined, with his daughter in his arms. He wouldn't leave her behind. No, he must have carried her across the Continent. There was good in Jim, after all, you see--only I, his father hadn't the sense to see it."