ue about the tiger though, because Major Roper says he's got
the skin himself now."

"Only it wasn't my father that shot it. That's quite clear." Sally was
feeling greatly relieved, and showed it in the way she added: "Now,
doesn't that just show what a parcel of nonsense the whole story is?"

Sally had never told her friend about her mother's name before she
took that of Nightingale. Very slight hints had sufficed to make her
reticent about Graythorpe. Colonel Lund had once said to her: "Of
course, your mother was Mrs. Graythorpe when she came to England; that
was before she changed her name to Nightingale, you know?" She
knew that her mother's money had come to her from a "grandfather
Nightingale," whose name had somehow accompanied it, and had been (very
properly, as it seemed to her) bestowed on herself as well as her
mother. They were part and parcel of each other obviously. In fact, she
had never more than just known of the existence of the name Graythorpe
in her family at all, and it had been imputed by her to this unpopular
father of hers, and put aside, as it were, on a shelf with him. Even if
her mother had not suggested a desire that the name should lapse, she
herself would have accepted its extinction on her own account.

But now this name came out of the past as a consolation. Palliser
indeed! How could mamma have been Mrs. Graythorpe if her husband's name
had been Palliser? Sally was not wise enough in worldly matters to know
that divorced ladies commonly fall back on their maiden names. And she
had been kept, or left, so much in the dark that she had taken for
granted that her mother's had been Nightingale--that, in fact, she had
retaken her maiden name at her father's wish, possibly as a censure
on the misbehaviour of a husband who drank or gambled or was otherwise
reprobate. Her young mind had been manipulated all one way--had been
in contact only with its manipulators. Had she had a sister or brother,
they would have canvassed the subject, speculated, run conclusions to
earth, and demanded enlightenment. She had none but her mother to go
to, unless it were Colonel Lund; and the painful but inevitable task of
both was to keep her in the dark about her parentage at all hazards.
"If ever," said the former to the latter, "my darling girl has a child
of her own, I may be able to tell her her mother's story." Till then,
it would be impossible.

Sally had had a narrow escape of knowing more about this stor