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.