And, then, with a sudden prick of his heart, he remembered the children. Oh, the children! To think that they could be so old as _that_, and that it had remained for her to find it out! Twenty! It was not possible little Archie could be that age. What a little chubby fellow he was, with a face as round as an apple, and little rosy cheeks--so like Mary, her very image. It had always been pleasanter to think of him like that, than to identify the little scrubby boy in the photographs poor Jane kept sending; or the lean lad who, he now remembered, had appeared on the last one. He had torn it up, as certainly a libel on his son, not at all the kind of picture which he could have wished to set up on his chimney-piece, and point out complacently to visitors as “my boy.” He remembered this incident of the photograph perfectly now, and that he refused angrily to accept that as a portrait of Archie. “The photograph you sent me was a mistake, I suppose,” he had written to his sister-in-law; “it is quite impossible it could be my boy;” and he forgot what explanation she made. He was not, indeed, very attentive to her letters. He glanced at them to see that the children were well, but he had seldom patience to read all the four pages. Jane’s style and her handwriting, and the very look of her letters had been vexatious to him for many years past. They suggested having been written on a kitchen table with a pen that was greasy. The very outside of them coming in the bag along with his business letters and his invitations gave Rowland a little shock. He preferred that other people should not see him receive these queer missives, the very envelopes of which looked common, not like the others. Now it occurred to him, with a pang, that it was no mistake, that the unwashed-looking lad, with the vulgar, ill-cut clothes was probably his son after all. The idea was horrible to him, but he was glad for one thing that he had torn the photograph up, and could not be made to produce it to show Evelyn what manner of youth Archie was--if he was like that! And then the baby, whom he had always thought of as the baby, with all the tenderness that belonged to the name. Tenderness! but something else as well--indifference, forgetfulness--or he could never have been so blind, and suffered them to grow up like that. It was a very tormenting and uncomfortable thought, and Rowland was anxious to shake it off. He said to himself that photographs never do justice to the subject; that perhaps the boy might be a fine boy for all that: and finally contrived to elude the whole disagreeable subject by saying to himself how clever it was of her to have made that out about their age! What a clever woman she was; not learned, or that sort of thing, but knowing so much, and so perfect in her manner, and such a true native-born lady. This was her grand quality above all. She said just the right thing, at the right time, never compromising any one, hurting nobody’s feelings.