Enough of itself to disturb her was the fact that now for the first time for thirty years she was able to examine some room different from her own--A large, high white-walled room with wide windows that displayed the park, sporting prints on the walls, antlers over the fireplace, a piano in one corner, a large bowl of primroses on the piano, some boxing-gloves and two old swords over the door, a wooden case with thin rosewood drawers and "Birds' Eggs" in gold letters upon it, a round table near the sofa upon which Roddy was lying and on the table a photograph of Rachel-- All these things her sharp old eyes noticed before she allowed them to settle upon Roddy-- His quiet, almost humorous "Well, Duchess," set, quite concisely, the note for this conversation. Not for either of them was it to betray any consciousness that this meeting of theirs was in any way out of the ordinary. Formerly it had been the ebullient, vigorous Roddy who had brought his vigour to renew her fierce old age; now that old age must be brought to him-- The Beaminsters did not show surprise at anything at all; had she come from her grave to visit him he would have greeted her with his quiet "Well, Duchess"--his life was broken in pieces, but she was not to offer any comment on that either. She was exhausted even by that little drive, and that little passage from door to door, so she just lay back in her chair for a little while and looked at him. His body was covered with a rug; his hands, still brown and large and clumsy, were folded on his lap; he was wonderfully tidy, brushed and cleaned, it seemed to her, as though he were always expecting a doctor or a visitor or were performed upon by some valet or other, simply, poor dear, that the time might be filled. His cheeks were paler of course and his face thinner, but it was in his eyes--his large, simple, singularly ungrown-up eyes she had always considered them--that the great change lay-- They smiled across at her with the same genial good temper that they had always presented to her. But indeed she could never call them "ungrown-up" again. Roddy Seddon had grown up indeed since she had seen him last; she knew now, as she faced the experience and, above all, the strength that those eyes now presented for her, that she had a new spirit to encounter. Yes--he "had had a horrible time," but she was wise enough, at that instant, to realise that the "horrible time" had drawn character out of him that she, at least, had never, for an instant, suspected. The old woman was moved so that she would have liked to have tottered to his sofa, to have caught his hands in her old dry ones, to have kissed him, to have smoothed his hair--but she sat quietly in her chair, recovered her breath and, grimly, almost saturninely, smiled at him. "Well, Roddy," she said, "how are you?"