He submitted at last to his companion’s uneasiness and walked on. But in his heart he thought: “That old woman in there might be reading a story about my own life! She might be reading about Shaftesbury-town and yellow bracken and Gerda’s whistling! She might be reading about Christie and the Malakite bookshop. She might be reading about Mattie⁠—” His thoughts veered suddenly. “Mattie? Mattie Smith?” And a wavering suspicion that had been gathering weight for some while in his mind suddenly took to itself an irrefutable shape. “Lorna and my father.⁠ ⁠… The little girl said we were alike.⁠ ⁠… That’s what it is!”

He did not formulate the word “sister” in any portion of his consciousness where ideas express themselves in words, but across some shadowy mental landscape within him floated and drifted that heavy-faced girl with a new and richly-charged identity! All the vague fragments of association that had gathered here and there in his life around the word “sister,” hastened now to attach themselves to the personality of Mattie Smith and to give it their peculiar glamour.