Richard eyed his son from the shade in which he stood. Val’s face was in the full light. It was pale, with a certain set of determination about the mouth, on which there hovered a somewhat forced smile. He paused a moment, wondering how to reply. A dim room is an admirable field for deliberation, with one face in the shade and the other in the light. Should he settle the subject with a high hand, and put the young man summarily down? Should he yield? He did neither. He altered his voice again with the consummate skill of a man trained to rule and make use of even his self-betrayals, and knowing every possible way of doing so. He laughed softly as he came back to the table, throwing off his impatience as if it had been a cloak. “A snare! a snare!” he said. “If you think I am so innocent as to fall into it, or if you hope to see me draw a chair to the table and begin, ‘My son, listen to the story of my life,’ you are mistaken, Val. I am like most other men. I have done things, and known people whom I should not care to have talked about--and which will be talked about inevitably if you are set up as a candidate for Eskside. Never mind! I shall have to put up with it, I suppose, since my father has set his heart upon it; but I warn you that it may come harder on you than me; and when I say so I have done. Give me your photographs, and let me look over them--a crowd of your Eton and Oxford friends, I suppose.” Val looked at his father with a question in his eyes, which he tried to put with his lips, and could not. During all these years he had thought little enough of his mother. Now and then the recollection that there was such a person wandering somewhere in the world would come to him at the most unlikely time--in the middle of the night, in the midst of some moment of excitement, rarely when he could make any inquiries about her, even had it been possible for him to utter such inquiries. Now at once these suppressed recollections rushed into his mind. Here was the fountain-head of information; and no doubt the story which he did not know, which no one had ever told him, was what his father feared. “Father,” he began, his mouth growing dry with excitement, his heart beating so loudly that he could scarcely hear himself speak. Probably Richard divined what he was going to say--for Val, I suppose, had hardly ever addressed him solemnly by this title before. He called him “Sir,” when he spoke to him, scarcely anything else. Richard stopped him with a rapid movement of his hand. “Don’t, for heaven’s sake, speak to me so solemnly,” he said, half fretfully, half playfully. “Let me look at your photographs. There is a good man here, by the way, where you should go and get yourself done. The old people at home would like it, and it might prove a foundation, who knows, for the fine steel engraving of the member for Eskside, which, no doubt will be published some day or other. Come round to this side and tell me who they are.”