He laughed happily.  “You have explained it all away.  I wish you had let me go on thinking I was dreaming.  To find you—­here!” He smothered an exultant breath and went on hastily:—­“I’m glad you find my mother beautiful.  I never knew how beautiful she was till I brought her up here and put her where I could look at her.  Such a little, girlish mother for such a strapping son!  But she has the look—­somehow she has the look!  Don’t you think she has?  I was a year old when that was painted—­just in time, for she died six months afterward.  But she had had time to get the look, hadn’t she?”

“Indeed she had.  I can imagine her holding her little son.  Is there no picture of her with you?”

“None at all that I can find.  I don’t know why.  There’s one of me on my father’s knee, four years old—­just before he went, too.  I am lucky to have it.  I can just remember him, but not my mother at all.  Do you mind my telling you that it was after I saw your mother I brought this portrait of mine up from the drawing-room and put it here?  It seemed to me I must have one somehow, if only the picture of one.”  His voice lowered.  “I can’t tell you what it has done for me, the having her here.”

“I can guess,” said Roberta softly, studying the young, gently smiling, picture face.  Somehow her former manner with this young man had temporarily deserted her.  The appeal of the portrait seemed to have extended to its owner.  “You—­don’t want to disappoint her,” she added thoughtfully.

“That’s it—­that’s just it,” he agreed eagerly.  “How did you know?”

“Because that’s the way I feel about mine.  They care so much, you know.”  She moved slowly toward the door.  “I must go back to your grandfather.”

“Why?  He has Mrs. Stephen, you say.  And I—­like to see you here.  There are a lot of things I want to show you.”  His eager gaze dropped to the desk-top and fell upon the ivory-framed photograph.  He looked quickly at her.  Her cheeks were of a rich rose hue, her eyes—­he could not tell what her eyes were like.  But she moved on toward the door.  He followed her into the other room.

“Won’t you stay a minute here, then?  I don’t care for it as I do the other, but—­it’s a place to talk in.  And I haven’t talked to you for—­four months.  It’s the middle of June....  Let me show you this picture over here.”

He succeeded in detaining her for a few minutes, which raced by on wings for him.  He did it only by keeping his speech strictly upon the subject of art, and presently, in spite of his endeavours, she was off across the room and out of the door, through the hall and in the company of Mrs. Stephen and Mr. Matthew Kendrick.  The pair, the old man and the girlish young mother, looked up from a collection of miniatures, brought out in continuance of the discussion over child faces begun by Rosamond’s interest in the colour-drawing found upon Richard’s walls.  They saw a flushed and heart-disturbing face under a drooping white hat-brim, and eyes which looked anywhere but at them, though Roberta’s voice said quite steadily:  “Rosy, do you know how long we are staying?”