of Fyne. Where, why, how, a rapid striding rush could be
brought in 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) recognised her outside a shop and rushed, actually
rushed, into Mrs Fyne's arms. Rather touching this. And so,
disregarding the cold impertinence of that ... h'm ... governess, his
wife naturally responded.

He was solemnly fragmentary. I broke in with the observation that it
must have been before the crash.

Fyne nodded with deepened gravity, stating in his bass tone.

"Just before," and indulged himself with a weighty period of solemn
silence.

De Barral, he resumed suddenly, was not coming to Brighton for weekends
regularly, then. Must have been conscious already of the approaching
disaster. Mrs Fyne avoided being drawn into making his acquaintance,
and this suit