Chapter 21 - Page 2

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 wickedly plotted. So he made up another
plot even more extraordinary and more diabolical still than the
first. He decided to pretend it was Mary Wharton that died, and to
palm you off on the world as his own child, Una Callingham. For if
Mary Wharton died, the property at once became absolutely your
mother's, and she could will it away to her husband or anyone else
she chose to."

"But baby was so much younger than I!" I cried, going back on my
recollections once more. "How could he ever manage to make the dates
come right again?"

"Quite true," Jack answered; "the baby was younger than you. But
your step-father--I've no other name by which I can call him--made a
clever plan to set that straight. He concealed from the people in
Australia which child had been ill, and he entered her death as Mary
Wharton. Then, to cover the falsification, he left Melbourne at
once, and travelled about for some years on the Continent in
out-of-the-way places till all had been forgotten. You went forth
upon the world as Una Callingham, with your true personality as Mary
Wharton all