tand still to the eye, and
I did not expect Catherine Evers, who could barely have reached that
rubicon, to show much symptom of the later marches. To me, here in her
den, the other year was just the other day. My time in India was little
better than a dream to me, while as for angry shots at either end of
Africa, it was never I who had been there to hear them. I must have come
by my sticks in some less romantic fashion. Nothing could convince me
that I had ever been many days or miles away from a room that I knew by
heart, and found full as I left it of familiar trifles and poignant
associations.

That was the shelf devoted to her poets; there was no addition that I
could see. Over it hung the fine photograph of Watts's "Hope," an ironic
emblem, and elsewhere one of that intolerably sad picture, his "Paolo
and Francesca": how I remembered the wet Sunday when Catherine took me
to see the original in Melbury Road! The old piano which was never
touched, the one which had been in St. Helena with Napoleon's doctor,
there it stood to an inch where it had stood of old, a sort of
grand-stand for the photographs of Catherine's friends. I descried my
own young effigy among the rest, in a frame which I recollected giving
her at the time. Well, I looked all the idiot I must have been; and
there was the very Persian rug that I had knelt on in my idiocy! I could
afford to smile at myself to-day; yet now it all seemed yesterday, not
even the day before, until of a sudden I caught sight of that other
photograph in the place of honour on the mantelpiece. It was one by
Hills and Sanders, of a tall youth in flannels, armed with a
long-handled racket, and the sweet open countenance which Robin Evers
had worn from his cradle upward. I should have known him anywhere and at
any age. It was the same dear, honest face; but to think that this giant
was little Bob! He had not gone to Eton when I saw him last; now I knew
from the sporting papers that he was up at Cambridge; but it was left to
his photograph to bring home the flight of time.

Certainly his mother would never have done so when all at once the door
opened and she stood before me, looking about thirty in the ample shadow
of a cavalier's hat. Simply but admirably gowned, as I knew she would
be, her slender figure looked more youthful still; yet in all this there
was no intent; the dry cool smile was that of an older woman, and I was
prepared for greater cordiality than I could honest