dry horror. "I should have abandoned it long
before. I should have run away--hard! To think that you didn't--that's
quite enough for me."

And again I sustained the full flattery of that speechless awe which was
yet unembarrassing by reason of its freedom from undue solemnity.

"There were some of us who hadn't a leg to run on," I had to say; "I was
one, Mrs. Evers."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Catherine, then." But it put me to the blush.

"Thank you. If you really wish me to call you 'Captain Clephane' you
have only to say so; but in that case I can't ask the favour I had made
up my mind to ask--of so old a friend."

Her most winning voice was as good a servant as ever; the touch of scorn
in it was enough to stimulate, but not to sting; and it was the same
with the sudden light in the steady intellectual eyes.

"Catherine," I said, "you can't indeed ask any favour of me! There you
are quite right. It is not a word to use between us."

Mrs. Evers gave me one of her deliberate looks before replying.

"And I am not so sure that it is a favour," she said softly enough at
last. "It is really your advice I want to ask, in the first place at all
events. Duncan, it's about old Bob!"

The corners of her mouth twitched, her eyes filled with a quaint
humorous concern, and as a preamble I was handed the photograph which I
had already studied on my own account.

"Isn't he a dear?" asked Bob's mother. "Would you have known him,
Duncan?"

"I did know him," said I. "Spotted him at a glance. He's the same old
Bob all over."

I was fortunate enough to meet the swift glance I got for that, for in
sheer sweetness and affection it outdid all remembered glances of the
past. In a moment it was as though I had more than regained the lost
ground of lost years. And in another moment, on the heels of the
discovery, came the still more startling one that I was glad to have
regained my ground, was thankful to be reinstated, and strangely,
acutely, yet uneasily happy, as I had never been since the old days in
this very room.

Half in a dream I heard Catherine telling of her boy, of his Eton
triumphs, how he had been one of the rackets pair two years, and in the
eleven his last, but "in Pop" before he was seventeen, and yet as simple
and unaffected and unspoilt with it all as the small boy whom I
remembered. And I did remember him, and knew his mother well enough to
believe it all; for she did not chant his praises to organ music, but