“Do you mean to say,” urged my companion, “that you have not seen her for years?”

I did not altogether like her tone.  Yet it was so downright and straightforward, it was hard to be the very reverse in answer to it, and I shied idiotically at the honest lie.  I had quite lost sight both of Bob and his mother, I declared, from the day I went to India until now.

“You mean until you came out here?” persisted Mrs. Lascelles.

“Until the other day,” I said, relying on a carefully affirmative tone to close the subject.  There was a pause.  I began to hope I had succeeded.  The flattering tale was never finished.

“I believe,” said Mrs. Lascelles, “that you saw Mrs. Evers in town before you started.”

It was too late to lie.

“As a matter of fact,” I answered easily, “I did.”

I built no hopes on the pause which followed that.  Somehow I had my face to the moon, and Mrs. Lascelles had her back.  Yet I knew that her scrutiny of me was more critical than ever.

“How funny of Bob never to have told me!” she said.

“Told you what?”

“That you saw his mother just before you left.”

“I didn’t tell him,” I said at length.

“That was funny of you, Captain Clephane.”

“On the contrary,” I argued, with the impudence which was now my only chance, “it was only natural.  Bob was rather raw with his friend Kennerley, you see.  You knew about that?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And why they fell out?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he might have thought the other fellow had been telling tales, and that I had come out to have an eye on him, if he had known that I happened to see his mother just before I started.”

There was another pause; but now I was committed to an attitude, and prepared for the worst.

“Perhaps there would have been some truth in it?” suggested Mrs. Lascelles.

“Perhaps,” I agreed, “a little.”

The pause now was the longest of all.  It had no terrors for me.  Another cloud had come between us and the moon.  I was sorry for that.  I felt that I was missing something.  Even the fine upstanding figure before me was no longer sharp enough to be expressive.

“I have been harking back,” explained Mrs. Lascelles, eventually.  “Now I begin to follow.  You saw his mother, you heard a report, and you volunteered or at least consented to come out and keep an eye on the dear boy, as you say yourself.  Am I not more or less right so far, Captain Clephane?”

Her tone was frozen honey.

“More or less,” I admitted ironically.

“Of course, I don’t know what report that other miserable young man may have carried home with him.  I don’t want to know.  But I can guess.  One does not stay in hotel after hotel without getting a pretty shrewd idea of the way people talk about one.  I know the sort of things they have been saying here.  You would hear them yourself, no doubt, Captain Clephane, as soon as you arrived.”