rather hummed them to the banjo; and one felt that her own demure
humour, so signal and so permanent a charm in Catherine, would have been
the saving of half-a-dozen Bobs.

"And yet," she wound up at her starting-point, "it's about poor old Bob
I want to speak to you!"

"Not in a fix, I hope?"

"I hope not, Duncan."

Catherine was serious now.

"Or mischief?"

"That depends on what you mean by mischief."

Catherine was more serious still.

"Well, there are several brands, but only one or two that really
poison--unless, of course, a man is very poor."

And my mind harked back to its first suspicion, of some financial
embarrassment, now conceivable enough; but Catherine told me her boy was
not poor, with the air of one who would have drunk ditchwater rather
than let the other want for champagne.

"It is just the opposite," she added: "in little more than a year, when
he comes of age, he will have quite as much as is good for him. You know
what he is, or rather you don't. I do. And if I were not his mother I
should fall in love with him myself!"

Catherine looked down on me as she returned from replacing Bob's
photograph on the mantelpiece. The humour had gone out of her eye; in
its place was an almost animal glitter, a far harder light than had
accompanied the significant reference to the patriotic impulse which she
had nipped in the bud. It was probably only the old, old look of the
lioness whose whelp is threatened, but it was something new to me in
Catherine Evers, something half-repellent and yet almost wholly fine.

"You don't mean to say it's that?" I asked aghast.

"No, I don't," Catherine answered, with a hard little laugh. "He's not
quite twenty, remember; but I am afraid that he is making a fool of
himself, and I want it stopped."

I waited for more, merely venturing to nod my sympathetic concern.

"Poor old Bob, as you may suppose, is not a genius. He is far too nice,"
declared Catherine's old self, "to be anything so nasty. But I always
thought he had his head screwed on, and his heart screwed in, or I never
would have let him loose in a Swiss hotel. As it was, I was only too
glad for him to go with George Kennerley, who was as good at work at
Eton as Bob was at games."

In Catherine's tone, for all the books on her shelves, the pictures on
her walls, there was no doubt at all as to which of the two an Eton boy
should be good at, and I agreed sincerely with another nod.

"They were to r