helpful relation to the good Fyne's present trouble and perplexity I
could not imagine; except on the principle that senseless pedestrianism
was Fyne's panacea for all the ills and evils bodily and spiritual of the
universe. It could be of no use for me to say or do anything. It was
bound to come. Contemplating his muscular limb encased in a
golf-stocking, and under the strong impression of the information he had
just imparted I said wondering, rather irrationally:

"And so de Barral had a wife and child! That girl's his daughter. And
how . . . "

Fyne interrupted me by stating again earnestly, as though it were
something not easy to believe, that his wife and himself had tried to
befriend the girl in every way--indeed they had! I did not doubt him for
a moment, of course, but my wonder at this was more rational. At that
hour of the morning, you mustn't forget, I knew nothing as yet of Mrs.
Fyne's contact (it was hardly more) with de Barral's wife and child
during their exile at the Priory, in the culminating days of that man's
fame.

Fyne who had come over, it was clear, solely to talk to me on that
subject, gave me the first hint of this initial, merely out of doors,
connection. "The girl was quite a child then," he continued. "Later on
she was removed out of Mrs. Fyne's reach in charge of a governess--a very
unsatisfactory person," he explained. His wife had then--h'm--met him;
and on her marriage she lost sight of the child completely. But after
the birth of Polly (Polly was the third Fyne girl) she did not get on
very well, and went to Brighton for some months to recover her
strength--and there, one day in the street, the child (she wore her hair
down her back still) recognized her outside a shop and rushed, actually