chapter of happenings which had made her acquainted, as abruptly as
tardily, with certain facts concerning her parentage.

You might, if you felt like it, call it a strange coincidence that she
should have read the advertisement of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher just before
their letter was delivered and Mama Thérèse by her intemperate conduct
warmed Sofia's simmering suspicions to the boiling point. But then Sofia
read the Agony Column every time it came into her hands: she would have
been more surprised had she missed noticing her given name in print, and
downright ashamed of herself if she had failed to associate the letter with
the advertisement.

If you asked her, she called it Fate, the foreordained workings of occult
forces charged with dominion over human affairs. Sooner or later she must
somehow have learned the truth about her right place in the world; and to
her way of thinking it was no more astonishing that she should have learned
it through accident supplemented by the acute inferences of a sharply
stimulated imagination, rather than through being waited upon by a
delegation of legal gentlemen commissioned with the duty of enlightening
her. And the colossal set-piece of the evening having been duly exploded,
no sequel whatever could expect anything better than relegation to the
cheerless limbo of anticlimax.

Thus when young Mr. Karslake explained his uninvited if timely intervention
by stating that he was conducting her to the parent of whose existence she
had so recently been informed, he succeeded--not to put too fine a point
upon it--only in making it all seem a bit thick.

So for the time being Sofia contented herself with silent study of his face
as fitfully revealed by the passing lights of Shaftesbury Avenue.