‘Now really,’ she said, smiling blandly, ‘is that quite fair? Think of all the scores and scores of faces in seventy long years; and how very treacherous memory is. You shall do me the service of _reminding_ me of one whose name has for the moment escaped me.’ ‘I am the son of a very old friend of yours, Miss Sinnet,’ said Lawford quietly ‘a friend that was once your schoolfellow at Brighton.’ ‘Well, now,’ said the old lady, grasping her umbrella, ‘that is undoubtedly a clue; but then, you see, all but one of the friends of my girlhood are dead; and if I have never had the pleasure of meeting her son, unless there is a decided resemblance, how am I to recollect _her_ by looking at _him?_’ ‘There is, I believe, a likeness,’ said Lawford. She nodded her great bonnet at him with gentle amusement. ‘You are insistent in your fancy. Well, let me think again. The last to leave me was Fanny Urquhart, that was—let me see—last October. Now you are certainly not Fanny Urquhart’s son,’ she stooped austerely, ‘for she never had one. Last year, too, I heard that my dear, dear Mrs Jameson was dead. _Her_ I hadn’t met for many, many years. But, if I may venture to say so, yours is not a Scottish face; and she not only married a Scottish husband, but was herself a Dunbar. No, I am still at a loss.’ A miserable strife was in her chance companion’s mind, a strife of anger and recrimination. He turned his eyes wearily to the fast declining sun. ‘You will forgive my persistency, but I assure you it is a matter of life or death to me. Is there no one my face recalls? My voice?’ Miss Sinnet drew her long lips together, her eyebrows lifted with the faintest perturbation. ‘But he certainly knows my name,’ she said to herself. She turned once more, and in the still autumnal beauty, beneath that pale blue arch of evening, these two human beings confronted one another again. She eyed him blandly, yet with a certain grave directness. ‘I don’t really think,’ she said, ‘you _can_ be Mary Lawford’s son. I could scarcely have mistaken _him_.’ Lawford gulped and turned away. He hardly knew what this surge of feeling meant. Was it hope, despair, resentment; had he caught even the echo of an unholy joy? His mind for a moment became confused as if in the tumult of a struggle. He heard himself expostulate, ‘Ah, Miss Bennett, I fear I set you too difficult a task.’ The old lady drew abruptly in, like a trustful and gentle snail into its shocked house. ‘Bennett, sir; but my name is not Bennett.’ And again Lawford accepted the miserable prompting. ‘Not Bennett!... How can I ever then apologise for so frantic a mistake?’