“Oh, I know him!” I cried wildly.  “It’s my father!  My father!”

Some minutes passed before Jack could go on with his story.  This rush of emotions was too much for me for a while.  I could hardly hear him or attend to him, so deeply did it stir me.

At last I calmed down, still holding that pathetic photograph on the table before me.

“Tell me all about him,” I murmured, sobbing.  “For, Jack, I remember now, he was so good and kind, and I loved him—­I loved him.”

Jack went on with his story, trying to soothe me and reassure me.  The old man introduced himself by very cautious degrees as a person in want, not so much of money, though of that to be sure he had none, as of kindness and sympathy in a very great sorrow.  He was a shipwrecked mariner, in a sense:  shipwrecked on the sea of Life and on the open Pacific as well.  But once he had been a clergyman, and a man of education, position, reputation, fortune.

Gradually as he went on Jack began to grasp at the truth of this curious tale.  The worn and battered stranger had but lately landed in London from a sailing vessel which had brought him over from a remote Pacific islet:  not a tropical islet of the kind with whose palms and parrots we are all so familiar, but a cold and snowy rock, away off far south, among the frosts and icebergs, near the Antarctic continent.  There for twenty long years that unhappy man had lived by himself a solitary life.

I started at the sound.

“For twenty years!” I exclaimed.  “Oh, Jack, you must be wrong; for how could that be?  I was only eighteen when all this happened.  How could my real father have been twenty years away from me, when I was only eighteen, and I remember him so perfectly?”

Jack looked at me and shook his head.

“You’ve much to learn yet, Una,” he answered.  “The story’s a long one.  You were not eighteen but twenty-two at the time.  You’ve been deliberately misled as to your own age all along.  You developed late, and were always short for your real years, not tall and precocious as we all of us imagined.  But you were four years older than Mr. Callingham pretended.  You’re twenty-six now, not twenty-two as you think.  Wait, and in time you’ll hear all about it.”

He went on with his story.  I listened, spell-bound.  The unhappy man explained to Jack how he had been wrecked on the voyage, and escaped on a raft with one other passenger:  how they had drifted far south, before waves and current, till they were cast at last on this wretched island:  how they remained there for a month or two, picking up a precarious living on roots and berries and eggs of sea-birds:  and how at last, one day, he had come back from hunting limpets and sea-urchins on the shore of a lonely bay—­to find, to his amazement, his companion gone, and himself left alone on that desolate island.  His fellow-castaway, he knew then, had deceived and deserted him!