talk of the German Universities, with
which he seemed very familiar; and of South America, the area of which,
he said, had stood in the way of his becoming equally familiar with it.
He had been about the world a good deal for a man of five-and-twenty.

"Gwen thought you were more," said Irene. "At Arthur's Bridge, you know!
She thought you were twenty-seven."

"Because I was so wet through. Naturally. I was soaked and streaky. Are
you sure it wasn't thirty-seven, Lady Gwendolen?"

It has been mentioned that Lady Ancester had a matter-of-fact
side to her character. But was it this that made her say
thoughtfully:--"Twenty-five perhaps--certainly not more!" Probably her
mind had run back nearly thirty years, and she was calculating from the
date of this man's father's marriage, which she knew; or from that of
his eldest brother's birth, which she also knew. She was not so clear
about Irene. At the time of that young lady's first birthday--her only
one, in fact--her close observation of her old flame's family dates was
flagging. But she was clear that this Adrian's birth had followed near
upon that of her own son Frank, drowned a few years since so near the
very place of this gunshot accident. The coincidence may have made her
identifications keener. Or Adrian's reckless chat, so like his father's
in old days that she had more than once gone near to comment on it, may
have roused old memories and set her a-fixing dates.

Adrian laughed at the way his age seemed to be treated as an open
question. "We have the Registrar on our side, at any rate, Lady
Ancester. I can answer for that. By-the-by, wasn't my father ... did not
my father?..." He wanted to say: "Was not my father a friend of your
brother in old days?" But it sounded as if the friendship, whatever it
was, had lessened in newer days, and he knew of nothing to warrant the
assumption. He knew nothing of his father's early love passages, of
course. Fathers don't tell their sons what narrow escapes they have had
of being somebody else, or somebody else being they--an awkward
expression!

Her ladyship thought over a phrase or two before she decided on:--"Your
father used to come to Clarges Street in my mother's time." She was
pleased with the selection; but less so with a second, one of several
she tried to herself and rejected. "We have really scarcely met since
those days. I thought him wonderfully little changed."

Has a parent of yours, you who read--or of ours,