In spite of my telegram Mrs. Evers was not at home when I arrived, but she had left a message which more than explained matters.  She was lunching out, but only in Brechin Place, and I was to wait in the study if I did not mind.  I did not, and yet I did, for the room in which Catherine certainly read her books and wrote her letters was also the scene of that which I was beginning to find it rather hard work to forget as it was.  Nor had it changed any more than her handwriting, or than the woman herself as I confidently expected to find her now.  I have often thought that at about forty both sexes stand still to the eye, and I did not expect Catherine Evers, who could barely have reached that rubicon, to show much symptom of the later marches.  To me, here in her den, the other year was just the other day.  My time in India was little better than a dream to me, while as for angry shots at either end of Africa, it was never I who had been there to hear them.  I must have come by my sticks in some less romantic fashion.  Nothing could convince me that I had ever been many days or miles away from a room that I knew by heart, and found full as I left it of familiar trifles and poignant associations.

That was the shelf devoted to her poets; there was no addition that I could see.  Over it hung the fine photograph of Watts’s “Hope,” an ironic emblem, and elsewhere one of that intolerably sad picture, his “Paolo and Francesca”:  how I remembered the wet Sunday when Catherine took me to see the original in Melbury Road!  The old piano which was never touched, the one which had been in St. Helena with Napoleon’s doctor, there it stood to an inch where it had stood of old, a sort of grand-stand for the photographs of Catherine’s friends.  I descried my own young effigy among the rest, in a frame which I recollected giving her at the time.  Well, I looked all the idiot I must have been; and there was the very Persian rug that I had knelt on in my idiocy!  I could afford to smile at myself to-day; yet now it all seemed yesterday, not even the day before, until of a sudden I caught sight of that other photograph in the place of honour on the mantelpiece.  It was one by Hills and Sanders, of a tall youth in flannels, armed with a long-handled racket, and the sweet open countenance which Robin Evers had worn from his cradle upward.  I should have known him anywhere and at any age.  It was the same dear, honest face; but to think that this giant was little Bob!  He had not gone to Eton when I saw him last; now I knew from the sporting papers that he was up at Cambridge; but it was left to his photograph to bring home the flight of time.