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