The lady was his mother; and the portrait had been painted just after her marriage, three years before his own birth. Never in his life had he seen any likeness of her. His father had not once mentioned her name in his hearing, and, as a little boy, he had been given by his nurses to understand that she existed somewhere in that mysterious and enormous category of things about which well-brought-up children were not supposed to inquire. There was a certain fitness in thus meeting her unknown face as he entered Whanland for the first time since he left it in the early months of his infancy. She had been here all the time, waiting for him in the dust and darkness. As he set the picture against the wall her eyes looked at him with a secret intelligence. That he had nothing to thank her for was a fact which he had gathered as soon as he grew old enough to draw deductions for himself; but, all the same, he now felt an unaccountable sympathy with her, not as his mother--for such a relationship had never existed for him--but as a human being. He went to the little window under the slope of the roof and looked out over the fields. On the shore the sea lay, far and sad, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The even, dreary sound came through a crack in the two little panes of glass. He turned back to the picture, though he could hardly see it in the strengthening dusk; her personality seemed to pervade the place with a brave, unavailing brightness. It struck him that, in that game of life which had ended in her death, there had been her stake too. But it was a point of view which he felt sure no other being he had known had ever considered. Mr. Barclay’s voice calling to him on the staircase brought him back from the labyrinth of thought. He hurried out of the garret to find him on the landing, rather short of breath after his ascent. ‘The Misses Robertson are below, Mr. Speid; they have driven out from Kaims to bid you welcome. I have left them in the library.’ ‘The Misses Robertson?’ ‘Miss Hersey and Miss Caroline Robertson; your cousins. The ladies will not be long before they find you out, you see. They might have allowed you a little more law, all the same. But women are made inquisitive--especially the old ones.’ ‘I think it vastly kind,’ said Speid shortly. ‘I remember now that my father spoke of them.’ As they entered the library, two small figures rose from their chairs and came forward, one a little in front of the other.