"The destruction of St. Pierre. You remember the awful accounts of it. The whole town was destroyed. Every building in the place--the local bank, the church, the presbytery, the post-office--was burned to the ground; everything was devastated for miles around. And thousands perished, of course."
"Mrs. de Mountford and her son Philip were amongst the very few who escaped. Their cottage was burned to the ground, but she, with all a Frenchwoman's sense of respect for papers and marks of identification, fought her way back into the house, even when it was tottering above her head, in order to rescue those things which she valued more than her life, the proofs that she was a respectable married woman and that Philip was her lawfully begotten son. Her second husband--I think from reading between the lines that he was a native or at best a half-caste--was one of the many who perished. But Mrs. de Mountford and Philip managed to reach the coast unhurt and to put out to sea in an open boat. They were picked up by a fishing smack from Marie Galante and landed there. It is a small island--French settlement, of course--off Guadeloupe. They had little or no money, and how they lived I don't know, but they stayed in Marie Galante for some time. Then the mother died, and Philip made his way somehow or other to Roseau in Dominica and thence to St. Vincent."
"And," she said, meditating on all that she had heard, "it was in St. Vincent that he first realized who he was--or might be?"
"Well, in a British colony it was bound to happen. Whether somebody put him up to it out there, or whether he merely sucked the information in from nowhere in particular, I can't say: certain it is that he did soon discover that the name he bore was one of the best known in England, and that his father must, as a matter of fact, have been own brother to the earl of Radclyffe. So he wrote to Uncle Rad."
Louisa was silent. She was absorbed in thought and for the moment Luke had come to the end of what he had to say--or, rather, of what he meant to say just now. That there was more to come, Louisa well knew. Commonplace women have a way of intuitively getting at the bottom of the thoughts of people for whom they care. Louisa guessed that beneath Luke's levity and his school-boyish slang--which grew more apparent as the man drew to the end of his narrative--that beneath his outward flippancy there lay a deep substratum of puzzlement and anxiety.