Dick went away without another word. He arranged to go to Oxford, and did so, and found Val, and finally made an agreement to take the situation offered him; but this little prick to his pride and affection rankled in his mind. Why should Mr Ross be so much more to her than himself, her son, who had never left her side? “It is strange,” he said, with a sense of injury, which grew fainter every moment, yet still lingered. He looked at Val with more interest than ever, and a curious feeling of somehow belonging to him. What could the link be? Dick knew very little about his own history; he did not know whose son he was, nor what his mother had been. The idea, indeed, gleamed across his mind that Val’s father might have been his own father, and this thought gave him no such thrill of pain and shame as it would naturally have brought to a young man brought up in a different class. Dick, with the terrible practical knowledge of human nature which belongs to the lower levels of society, knew that such things happened often enough; and if he felt a little movement in his mind of unpleasant feeling, he was neither horrified by the suggestion of such a possibility, nor felt his mother lowered in his eyes. Whatever the facts were, they were beyond his ken; and it was not for him to judge them. Pondering it over, however, he came to feel with a little relief that this could not be the solution. He knew what the manners of his class were, and he knew that his mother had always been surrounded by that strange abstract atmosphere of reserve and modesty which no one else of her degree resembled her in. No, that could not be the explanation. Perhaps she had recognised in Val the son of some love of her youth whom she had kept in her thoughts throughout all her rougher life. This was a strangely visionary hypothesis, and Dick felt how unreal it was; but what other explanation could he make?