"So I began to make inquiries," continued Challoner. "I found out who were the patrons, who took most interest in the institution, and amongst them who had adopted a child. I came upon you in the end." And again he began to laugh. "Those poor innocent old women had actually given me the date when you took Doris away as the date of the child's death. It took me a little time to find out all about you; and when I had found out I had no money. So I had to work my way along until I reached you. But I have reached you," he exclaimed, lolling back in his chair, "and, by George, the very first day I am at work here, out the girl comes to meet me. Why, I recognized her in a second;" and Joan slipped in, as she thought, under his guard. With a thrill of delight she believed that he had made a mistake, and a mistake which would discredit every word of his story. "Recognized her!" she repeated scornfully. "And the last time, when, on your own showing, you saw her she was three years old!" Challoner, however, merely smiled at her. "If you had a family at your back, old lady, you wouldn't be so high," he said; and once more Robert Daventry interposed. "Speak respectfully to my wife," he cried. "What, are you butting in again?" asked Challoner, with a look of surprise. "You didn't do any good, you know, the last time you interfered." Once more Joan was called upon to restrain her husband. She saw the man convicted of a lie, and she did not mean to lose the advantage of that conviction. "How did you recognize her?" she asked, smiling in her turn. "How did you recognize in the girl of seventeen the child of three?" "I'll tell you," said Challoner confidently. "And, by the way, she's not seventeen to-day. It might interest you to know that. She's seventeen and a half. She was born on the seventeenth of July." "Keep to the point," said Joan. "Certainly, I will," replied Challoner, "though it's by no means necessary to substantiate my authority--yes," and his voice suddenly rang out loud upon the word, so that Cynthia in the darkness on the other side of the door shivered as if she had been struck, "yes, my authority. I don't say that she's like what she was when she was three. I don't even say she's like her mother. She isn't. She's a Challoner--and in the Challoner's home, by Wareham in Dorsetshire, there are some pictures worth looking at. I sat opposite one of them at the dinner table all through my boyhood, and whenever I was at home afterward--until I came out here. It was the portrait of my great-great-grandmother, painted by Romney, when she was a girl; and I tell you the girl who came stepping so prettily across the field this morning, in her white frock and big straw hat, might have stepped right out of that picture frame. That's how I recognized her."