There was no room, indeed, to doubt the treachery of the wretched being who had so basely treated him.  As he looked, a ship under full sail stood away to northward.  In vain the unhappy man made wild signals from the shore with his tattered garments.  No notice was taken of them.  His companion must deliberately have suppressed the other’s existence, and pretended to be alone by himself on the island.

“And his name?” Jack asked of the poor old man, horrified.

The stranger answered without a moment’s pause: 

“His name, if you want it—­was Vivian Callingham.”

“And yours?” Jack continued, as soon as he could recover from his first shock of horror.

“And mine,” the poor castaway replied, “is Richard Wharton.”

As Jack told me those words, another strange thrill ran through me.

“Richard Wharton was the name of mamma’s first husband.  Then I’m not a Callingham at all!” I cried, unable to take it all in at first in its full complexity.  “I’m really a Wharton!”

Jack nodded his head in assent.

“Yes, you’re really a Wharton,” he said.  “You’re the baby that died, as we all were told.  Your true Christian name’s Mary.  But, Una, you were always Una to all of us in England; and though the real Una Callingham died when you were a little girl of three or four years old, you’ll be Una always now to Elsie and me.  We can’t think of you as other than we’ve always called you.”

Then he went on to explain to me how the stranger had landed in London, alone and friendless, twenty years later, from a passing Australian merchant vessel which had picked him up on the island.  All those years he had waited, and fed himself on eggs of penguins.  He landed by himself, the crew having given him a suit of old clothes, and subscribed to find him in immediate necessaries.  He began to inquire cautiously in London about his wife and family.  At first, he could learn little or nothing; for nobody remembered him, and he feared to ask too openly, a sort of Enoch Arden terror restraining him from proclaiming his personality till he knew exactly what had happened in his long absence.  But bit by bit, he found out at last that his wife had married again, and was now long dead:  and that the man she had married was Vivian Callingham, his own treacherous companion on the Crozet Islands.  As soon as he learned that, the full depth of the man’s guilt burst upon him like a thunderbolt.  Richard Wharton understood now why Vivian Callingham had left him alone on those desert rocks, and sailed away in the ship without telling the captain of his fellow-castaway’s plight.  He saw the whole vile plot the man had concocted at once, and the steps he had taken to carry it into execution.

Vivian Callingham, whom I falsely thought my father, had gone back to Australia with pretended news of Richard Wharton’s death.  He had sought my widowed mother in her own home up country, and told her a lying tale of his devotion to her husband in his dying moments on that remote ocean speck in the far Southern Pacific.  By this story he ingratiated himself.  He knew she was rich:  he knew she was worth marrying:  and to marry her, he had left my own real father, Richard Wharton, to starve and languish for twenty years among rocks and sea-fowl on a lonely island!