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 rushed, into Mrs.Fyne's arms.