had lived by himself a solitary life.

I started at the sound.

"For twenty years!" I exclaimed. "Oh, Jack, you must be wrong; for
how could that be? I was only eighteen when all this happened. How
could my real father have been twenty years away from me, when I was
only eighteen, and I remember him so perfectly?"

Jack looked at me and shook his head.

"You've much to learn yet, Una," he answered. "The story's a long
one. You were NOT eighteen but twenty-two at the time. You've been
deliberately misled as to your own age all along. You developed
late, and were always short for your real years, not tall and
precocious as we all of us imagined. But you were four years older
than Mr. Callingham pretended. You're twenty-six now, not
twenty-two as you think. Wait, and in time you'll hear all about
it."

He went on with his story. I listened, spell-bound. The unhappy
man explained to Jack how he had been wrecked on the voyage, and
escaped on a raft with one other passenger: how they had drifted far
south, before waves and current, till they were cast at last on this
wretched island: how they remained there for a month or two, picking
up a precarious living on roots and berries and eggs of sea-birds:
and how at last, one day, he had come back from hunting limpets and
sea-urchins on the shore of a lonely bay--to find, to his
amazement, his companion gone, and himself left alone on that
desolate island. His fellow-castaway, he knew then, had deceived and