Colonel Challoner was not aware that it was just the weight of the little daughter in Jim's arms which had made his journey across the Andes possible and profitable. Cynthia left him all the comfort of his delusion, and all its remorse, since the remorse was so completely outweighed by the comfort. "That's the last I have been able to find out," Colonel Challoner resumed. "They disappeared up into the mountains together, and years after Jim--died--in the Argentine. As for the daughter, I have come upon no trace of her. She may have lived. She may have died. Had she lived she would have been just about your age, Mrs. Rames." "Indeed?" "I suppose that you never heard of her?" "What was her name?" "Even that I can't tell you. There was a daughter. That's all I know." Colonel Challoner waited with his eyes upon Cynthia's face. He longed, yet he hardly dared to hope for an answer. It would be such a wonderful thing for him if the girl facing him in his trim brick-walled garden had when a child eighteen years ago been carried in Jim's arms over the stupendous passes of the Andes. Surely if it were so, she must admit it now out of gratitude for Jim's devotion. But Cynthia made no reply and he moved slowly to the door of the garden and held it open for her to pass out. She went from Bramling with her secret still her own, though some remorse was now her penalty for keeping it. She could not quite get rid of the picture of the old man at the open door in the high red-brick wall waiting wistfully for an answer to a question which he could only suggest. But she had made her plan and with a certain stubbornness--almost a hardness which marked this phase of her life--she had abided by it. If Colonel Challoner had said clearly and formally that he made no claim upon her, that he did not ask her to take her place in the family of Challoners, then she would have acknowledged what he plainly suspected. But he had imposed upon himself no such condition. On the contrary she had been led to believe that he would claim her; and that was intolerable to her thoughts. She did not argue or reason; she recollected. And what she recollected was a night of horror when her father had claimed her for the ruin of her body and her soul. When she stepped into the train she made a silent vow that she would never come to Bramling again. "It's a strange thing," said Harry Rames as they were travelling across the country, "that two strangers to Bramling, Devenish and myself, noticed your extraordinary likeness to that picture on the wall, and Challoner who has sat beneath it most nights of the week for years didn't. It had become so familiar to him, I suppose, that it had ceased to have definite features."