solitude only broken in the holidays of his only child, then a boy of twelve at a preparatory school.

I first heard of the boy's existence when Coplestone chose the papers for his house. Anything seemed good enough for the "three reception-rooms and usual offices"; but over a bedroom and a play room on the first floor we were an hour deciding against every pattern in the books, and then on the exact self-colour to be obtained elsewhere. It was at the end of that hour that a chance remark, about the evening paper and the latest cricket, led to a little conversation, insignificant in itself, yet enough to bring Coplestone and me into touch about better things than house decoration. Often after that, when he came down of an afternoon, he would look in at the office and leave me his Pall Mall. And he brought the boy in with him on the first day of the midsummer holidays.

"Ronnie's a keen cricketer at present," said Coplestone on that occasion. "But he's got to be a wet-bob like his old governor when he goes on to Eton. That's what we're here for, isn't it, Ronnie? We're going to take each other on the river every blessed day of the holidays."

Ronnie beamed with the brightest little face in all the world. He had bright brown eyes and dark brown hair, and his skin burnt a delicate brown instead of the paternal pink. His expression was his father's, but not an atom of his colouring. His mother must have been a brunette and a beautiful woman. I could not help thinking of her as I looked at the beaming boy who seemed to have forgotten his loss, if he had ever realised it. And yet it was just a touch of something in his face, a something pensive and constrained, when he was not smiling, that gave him also such a look of Coplestone at times.

But as a rule Ronnie was sizzling with happiness and excitement; and it was my privilege to see a lot of him those hot holidays. Coplestone did not go away for a single night or day. Most mornings one met him and his boy in flannels, on their way down to the river, laden with their lunch. But because the exclusive society of the best of boys must eventually bore the most affectionate of men, I was sometimes invited to join the picnic, and on Saturdays and Sundays I accepted more than once. Those, however, were the days on which I was nearly always bespoke by Uvo Delavoye, and once when I said so it ended in our all going off together in a bigger boat. That day marked a decline in Ronnie's regard for me as an ex-member of a minor school eleven. It was not, perhaps, that he admired me less, but that Delavoye, who played no games at 

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