“Blue and corn-colour—­should you call it?—­and gold.  Dull tints in the background, and the candle-light on Miss Ruth’s hair and her sister’s cheek.  It makes the prettiest picture yet in my new collection of family groups.”

Mrs. Stephen looked at him curiously.  “Are you making a collection of family groups?” she inquired.  “Beginning away back with your first memories?”

“My first memories are not of family groups—­only of nurses and tutors, with occasional portraits of my grandfather making inquiries as to how I was getting on.  And my later memories are all of school and college—­then of travel.  Not a home scene among them.”

“You poor boy!” There was something maternal in Mrs. Stephen’s tone, though she looked considerably younger than the object of her pity.  “But you must have looked at plenty of other family groups, if you had none of your own.”

“That’s exactly what I haven’t done.”

“But you’ve lived—­in the world,” she cried under her breath, puzzled.

A curious expression came into the young man’s face.  “That’s exactly what I have done,” he said quietly.  “In the world, not in the home.  I’ve not even seen homes—­like this one.  The sight of brother and sisters playing violin and harp and ’cello together, with the father and mother and brother and uncle looking on, is absolutely so new to me that it has a fascination I can’t explain.  I find myself continually watching you all—­if you’ll forgive me—­in your relations to each other.  It’s a new interest,” he admitted, smiling, “and I can’t tell you what it means to me.”

She shook her head.  “It sounds like a strange tale to me,” said she, “but I suppose it must be true.  How much you have missed!”

“I’m just beginning to realize it.  I never knew it till I began to come here.  I thought I was well enough off—­it seems I’m pretty poor.”

It was rather a strange speech for a young man of his class to make.  Possibly it indicated the existence of those “brains” with which his grandfather had credited him.

“Well, Rob, do you think he had as dull a time as you said he would have?”

The inquirer was Ruth.  She stood, still in the corn-coloured frock, in the doorway of her sister’s room, from which her own opened.  “Please unhook me,” she requested, approaching Roberta and turning her back invitingly.

Roberta, already out of the blue-silk gown, released her young sister from the imprisonment of her hooks and eyes.

“His manners are naturally too good to make it clear whether he had a dull time or not,” was Roberta’s non-committal reply.

“I don’t believe his manners are too good to cover up his being bored, if he was bored,” Ruth went on.  “He certainly wasn’t bored all the time, anybody could tell that.  He’s very good-looking, isn’t he?”

“If you care for that sort of good looks—­yes.”

“What sort?”