here?" persisted Mrs. Lascelles.

"Until the other day," I said, relying on a carefully affirmative tone
to close the subject. There was a pause. I began to hope I had
succeeded. The flattering tale was never finished.

"I believe," said Mrs. Lascelles, "that you saw Mrs. Evers in town
before you started."

It was too late to lie.

"As a matter of fact," I answered easily, "I did."

I built no hopes on the pause which followed that. Somehow I had my face
to the moon, and Mrs. Lascelles had her back. Yet I knew that her
scrutiny of me was more critical than ever.

"How funny of Bob never to have told me!" she said.

"Told you what?"

"That you saw his mother just before you left."

"I didn't tell him," I said at length.

"That was funny of you, Captain Clephane."

"On the contrary," I argued, with the impudence which was now my only
chance, "it was only natural. Bob was rather raw with his friend
Kennerley, you see. You knew about that?"

"Oh, yes."

"And why they fell out?"

"Yes."

"Well, he might have thought the other fellow had been telling tales,
and that I had come out to have an eye on him, if he had known that I
happened to see his mother just before I started."

There was another pause; but now I was committed to an attitude, and
prepared for the worst.

"Perhaps there would have been some truth in it?" suggested Mrs.
Lascelles.

"Perhaps," I agreed, "a little."

The pause now was the longest of all. It had no terrors for me. Another
cloud had come between us and the moon. I was sorry for that. I felt
that I was missing something. Even the fine upstanding figure before me
was no longer sharp enough to be expressive.

"I have been harking back," explained Mrs. Lascelles, eventually. "Now I
begin to follow. You saw his mother, you heard a report, and you
volunteered or at least consented to come out and keep an eye on the
dear boy, as you say yourself. Am I not more or less right so far,
Captain Clephane?"

Her tone was frozen honey.

"More or less," I admitted ironically.

"Of course, I don't know what report that other miserable young man may
have carried home with him. I don't want to know. But I can guess. One
does not stay in hotel after hotel without getting a pretty shrewd idea
of the way people talk about one. I know the sort of things they have
been saying here. You would hear them yourself, no doubt, Captain
Clephane, as soon as you arrived."

I admitted that I had, but