Mrs. Towse had gone to the garage to get him, and the old gentleman waiting in the small front room felt his heart pounding most unusually—he couldn’t imagine why. He’d never set eyes on the boy. How could he be so disturbed over the question of the kind of boy he’d prove to be? At last Mrs. Towse, breathing hard, came briskly into the room, followed by a boyish-looking young man with a pale face and steady brown eyes. “’Ere ’e is, sir! This is Charlie Haworth!” The two shook hands, Haworth with his serious, steady gaze on the older man. “Come now, Mrs. Towse” (from Mr. Cripps, smiling), “you didn’t give him his full name. You may not know it, Mr. Haworth, but your middle name is Michael and you owe it, in a certain sense, to me.” The young fellow nodded slightly without taking his eyes off Mr. Cripps. He was a trifle above medium height and rather slim, with a delicate sort of face smooth shaven. His hair was dark but not black. He wore “jumpers” over his regular clothes, and his hands, notwithstanding that Mrs. Towse had made him wash them, were soiled with what would not come off. The most noticeable thing about him was a sort of innocent childlikeness in the steady, serious gaze of his luminous brown eyes. When they were turned toward a person who spoke or was spoken of, they rested on him for some little time, giving the impression, not of staring, but of calmly reflecting on what he saw or what the person was or had been saying. They talked a little, Haworth answering with quiet and simple directness when asked about his work and what, in the way of inventions, was particularly interesting him at the present moment. It proved to be what is known as a “time stamp”—a device for printing the exact hour and minute of the day on workmen’s cards as they passed in and out of factories, or on letters and such things in offices and hotels. These machines must carry a movable printing mechanism that is controlled by clockwork. “Is that a new idea?” Cripps asked. “No. I’m making one on a new principle, that’s all.” “I see—new principle. And it’ll be a better one than the old, of course?” “Well, I’ll like it better, anyway,” Haworth answered, with a shadowy smile, the first Mr. Cripps had seen on his serious face, and he was struck by the way it lighted it up for the brief time it was there. A moment of silence followed. Then Haworth, serious again, asked in a low voice, “Is your name Michael?” “Yes—Michael Cripps.” “My mother told me. She spoke of you once in a while.” Mr. Cripps was silent a moment, quite moved. “I was looking over some letters,” he soon resumed, “and came across the one she wrote telling me she’d given you the Michael out of my name, and it—well, I had a sudden feeling that I—that I’d very much like to see you—and—and her too if such a thing had been possible.” Another silence, then, “Did you bring the letter?” Haworth asked.