The plot seemed too diabolical and too improbable for anybody to believe.  Jack could hardly think it possible when his new friend told him.  But the stranger 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 obscured even in your own memory.  Fortunately for your false father’s plot, you were small for your age, and developed slowly:  he gave out, on the contrary, that you were big for your years and had outgrown yourself, Australian-wise, both in wisdom and stature.”