And my mind harked back to its first suspicion, of some financial embarrassment, now conceivable enough; but Catherine told me her boy was not poor, with the air of one who would have drunk ditchwater rather than let the other want for champagne.

“It is just the opposite,” she added:  “in little more than a year, when 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.

“They were to read together for an hour or so every day.  I thought it would be a nice little change for Bob, and it was quite a chance; he must do a certain amount of work, you see.  Well, they only went at the beginning of the month, and already they have had enough of each other’s society.”

“You don’t mean that they’ve had a row?”

Catherine inclined a mortified head.

“Bob never had such a thing in his life before, nor did I ever know anybody who succeeded in having one with Bob.  It does take two, you know.  And when one of the two has an angelic temper, and tact enough for twenty—­”

“You naturally blame the other,” I put in, as she paused in visible perplexity.

“But I don’t, Duncan, and that’s just the point.  George is devoted to Bob, and is as nice as he can be himself, in his own sober, honest, plodding way.  He may not have the temper, he certainly has not the tact, but he worships Bob and has come back quite miserable.”

“Then he has come back, and you have seen him?”