As Jack went on unfolding that strange tale of fraud and heartless wrong, my interest every moment grew more and more absorbing. But I can’t recall it now exactly as Jack told me it. I can only give you the substance of that terrible story.

When Richard Wharton first learned of his wife’s second marriage during his own lifetime to that wicked wretch who had ousted and supplanted him, he believed also, on the strength of Vivian Callingham’s pretences, that his own daughter had died in her babyhood in Australia. He fancied, therefore, that no person of his kin remained alive at all, and that he might proceed to denounce and punish Vivian Callingham. With that object in view, he tramped down all the way from London to Torquay, to make himself known to his wife’s relations, the Moores, and to their cousin, Courtenay Ivor of Babbicombe—my Jack, as I called him. For various reasons of his own, he called first on Jack, and proceeded to detail to him this terrible family story.

At first hearing, Jack could hardly believe such a tale was true—of his Una’s father, as he still thought Vivian Callingham. But a strange chance happened to reveal a still further complication. It came out in this way. I had given Jack a recent photograph of myself in fancy dress, which hung up over his mantelpiece. As the weather-worn visitor’s eye fell on the picture, he started and grew pale.

“Why, that’s her!” he cried with a sudden gasp. “That’s my daughter—Mary Wharton!”

Well, naturally enough Jack thought, to begin with, this was a mere mistake on his strange visitor’s part.

“That’s her half-sister,” he said, “Una Callingham—your wife’s child by her second marriage. She may be like her, no doubt, as half-sisters often are. But Mary Wharton, I know, died some eighteen years ago or so, when Una was quite a baby, I believe. I’ve heard all about it, because, don’t you see, I’m engaged to Una.”

The poor wreck of a clergyman, however, shook his head with profound conviction. He knew better than that.

“Oh no,” he said decisively: “that’s my child, Mary Wharton. Even after all these years, I couldn’t possibly be mistaken. Blood is thicker than water: I’d know her among ten thousand. She’d be just that age now, too. I see the creature’s vile plot. His daughter died young, and he’s palmed off my Mary as his own child, to keep her money in his hands. But never mind the money. Thank Heaven, she’s alive! That’s her! That’s my Mary!”

The plot seemed too diabolical and too improbable for anybody to believe. Jack could hardly think it possible when his new friend told him. But the stranger persisted so—it’s hard for me even to think of him as quite really my father—that Jack at last brought out two or three earlier photographs I’d given him some time before; and his visitor recognised them at once, in all their stages, as his own daughter. This roused Jack’s curiosity. He determined to hunt the matter up with his unknown connection. And he hunted it up thenceforward with deliberate care, till he proved every word of it.

Meanwhile, the poor broken-down man, worn out with his long tramp and his terrible emotions, fell ill almost at once, in Jack’s own house, and became rapidly so feeble that Jack dared not question him further. The return to civilisation was more fatal than his long solitary banishment. At the end of a week he died, leaving on Jack’s mind a profound conviction that all he had said was true, and that I was really Richard Wharton’s daughter, not Vivian Callingham’s.

“For a week or two I made inquiries, Una,” Jack said to me as we sat there,—“inquiries which I won’t detail to you in full just now, but which gradually showed me the truth of the poor soul’s belief. What you yourself told me just now chimes in exactly with what I discovered elsewhere, by inquiry and by letters from Australia. The baby that died was the real Una Callingham. Shortly after its death, your stepfather and your mother left the colony. All your real father’s money had been bequeathed to his child: and your mother’s also was settled on you. Mr. Callingham saw that if your mother died, and you lived and married, he himself would be deprived of the fortune for which he had so wicke............