And again I sustained the full flattery of that speechless awe which was yet unembarrassing by reason of its freedom from undue solemnity.

“There were some of us who hadn’t a leg to run on,” I had to say; “I was one, Mrs. Evers.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Catherine, then.”  But it put me to the blush.

“Thank you.  If you really wish me to call you ‘Captain Clephane’ you have only to say so; but in that case I can’t ask the favour I had made up my mind to ask—­of so old a friend.”

Her most winning voice was as good a servant as ever; the touch of scorn in it was enough to stimulate, but not to sting; and it was the same with the sudden light in the steady intellectual eyes.

“Catherine,” I said, “you can’t indeed ask any favour of me!  There you are quite right.  It is not a word to use between us.”

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 remembered.  And I did remember him, and knew his mother well enough to believe it all; for she did not chant his praises to organ music, but rather hummed them to the banjo; and one felt that her own demure humour, so signal and so permanent a charm in Catherine, would have been the saving of half-a-dozen Bobs.

“And yet,” she wound up at her starting-point, “it’s about poor old Bob I want to speak to you!”

“Not in a fix, I hope?”

“I hope not, Duncan.”

Catherine was serious now.

“Or mischief?”

“That depends on what you mean by mischief.”

Catherine was more serious still.

“Well, there are several brands, but only one or two that really poison—­unless, of course, a man is very poor.”