No Hero | Page 4

enough to stimulate, but not to sting; and it was the
same with the sudden light in the steady intellectual eyes.
"Catherine," I said, "you can't indeed ask any favour of me! There you
are quite right. It is not a word to use between us."
Mrs. Evers gave me one of her deliberate looks before replying.
"And I am not so sure that it is a favour," she said softly enough at last.
"It is really your advice I want to ask, in the first place at all events.
Duncan, it's about old Bob!"
The corners of her mouth twitched, her eyes filled with a quaint

humorous concern, and as a preamble I was handed the photograph
which I had already studied on my own account.
"Isn't he a dear?" asked Bob's mother. "Would you have known him,
Duncan?"
"I did know him," said I. "Spotted him at a glance. He's the same old
Bob all over."
I was fortunate enough to meet the swift glance I got for that, for in
sheer sweetness and affection it outdid all remembered glances of the
past. In a moment it was as though I had more than regained the lost
ground of lost years. And in another moment, on the heels of the
discovery, came the still more startling one that I was glad to have
regained my ground, was thankful to be reinstated, and strangely,
acutely, yet uneasily happy, as I had never been since the old days in
this very room.
Half in a dream I heard Catherine telling of her boy, of his Eton
triumphs, how he had been one of the rackets pair two years, and in the
eleven his last, but "in Pop" before he was seventeen, and yet as simple
and unaffected and unspoilt with it all as the small boy whom I
remembered. And I did remember him, and knew his mother well
enough to believe it all; for she did not chant his praises to organ music,
but rather hummed them to the banjo; and one felt that her own demure
humour, so signal and so permanent a charm in Catherine, would have
been the saving of half-a-dozen Bobs.
"And yet," she wound up at her starting-point, "it's about poor old Bob
I want to speak to you!"
"Not in a fix, I hope?"
"I hope not, Duncan."
Catherine was serious now.
"Or mischief?"

"That depends on what you mean by mischief."
Catherine was more serious still.
"Well, there are several brands, but only one or two that really
poison--unless, of course, a man is very poor."
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