CHAPTER XIII

NUMBER THREE

It was the middle of November when I was shown once more into the old room at the old number in Elm Park Gardens.  There was a fire, the windows were shut, and the electric light was a distinct improvement when the maid put it on; otherwise all was exactly as I had left it in August, and so often pictured it since.  There was “Hope,” presiding over the shelf of poets, and here “Paolo and Francesca,” reminiscent as ever of Melbury Road, upon a wet Sunday, years and years ago.  The day’s Times and the week’s Spectator were not less prominent than the last new problem novel; all three lay precisely where their predecessors had always lain; and my own dead self stood in its own old place upon the piano which had been in St. Helena with Napoleon.  It is vanity’s deserts to come across these unnecessary memorials of a decently buried boyhood; there is always something stultifying about them, and I longed to confiscate this one of me.

But there was a photograph on the chimney-piece that interested me keenly; it was evidently the very latest of Bob Evers, and I studied it with a painful curiosity.  Was the boy really altered, or did I only imagine it from my secret knowledge of his affairs?  To me he seemed graver, more sedate, less angelically trustful in expression, and yet something finer and manlier withal:  to confirm the idea one had only to compare this new one with the racket photograph now relegated to a rear rank.  The round-eyed look was gone.  Had I here yet another memorial of yet another buried boyhood?  If so, I felt I was the sexton, and I might be ashamed, and I was.

“Looking at Bob?  Isn’t it a dear one of him?  You see—­he is none the worse!”

And Catherine Evers stood smiling as warmly, as gratefully, as she grasped my hand; but with her warmth there was a certain nervousness of manner, which had the odd effect of putting me perversely at my ease; and I found myself looking critically at Catherine, really critically, for I suppose the first time in my life.

“He is playing foot-ball,” she continued, full as ever of her boy.  “I had a letter from him only this morning.  He had his colours at Eton, you know (he had them for everything there), but he never dreamt of getting them at Cambridge, yet now he really thinks he has a chance!  They tried him the other day, and he kicked a goal.  Dear old Bob!  If he does get them he will be a Blue and a half, he says.  He writes so happily, Duncan!  I have so much to be thankful for—­to thank you for!”

Yes, Catherine was good to look at; there was no doubt of it; and this time she was not wearing any hat.  Discoursing of the lad, she was animated, eager, for once as exclamatory as her pen, with light and life in every look of the thin intellectual face, in every glance of the large, intellectual eyes, and in every intonation of the keen dry voice.  A sweet woman; a young woman; a woman with a full heart of love and sympathy and tenderness—­for Bob!  Yet, when she thanked me at the end, either upon an impulse, or because she thought she must, her eyes fell, and again I detected that slight embarrassment which was none the less a revelation, to me, in Catherine Evers, of all women in the world.