Richard said to himself under his breath; but all his reasoning did nothing for him. He was anxious, uneasy, as parents so often are; his imagination in spite of him strayed into a thousand wonderings; he had to call himself back, even when in the middle of a despatch, from those ridiculous questionings about Val; and at last the commotion in his mind became more than he could comfortably bear. Nor was it only Valentine who had roused the life which had half congealed within his father’s veins. The photograph which chance had thrown into his hands had not been without its effect in rousing him. When he murmured _maladetta!_ between his closed teeth, he was as much in earnest as a man can be when he looks, disenchanted, and with all the glamour gone out of his middle-aged eyes, upon the fair face, no longer so fair, which had made havoc with his youth. But somehow the knowledge that he had that scrap of paper in his desk affected Richard in a way which no one who knew him could have believed possible. He had no portrait of her--nothing by which he could recall her face; and this glimpse of her--so unexpected, so changed, and yet so unmistakable--the face of the woman who was her, yet not her--the same creature whom he had married, yet another being of whom he knew absolutely nothing--had moved him as I suppose nothing else connected with her could have done. He would have been as intolerant now of any attempt to recall his affections to her as when Lady Eskside tried, and failed, to rouse him to interest in his wife. Even had any other creature been aware of the existence of the portrait--had any one known that he had kept and secured it, and would take it out now and then, with a half sneer on his face, to look at it, when he was certain no one could disturb him--Richard would have been as hard, as unyielding, as defiant as ever. But the fact that no one knew opened his heart so far. Sometimes he would say to himself with a curious subdued laugh, “Looks as if she had been a lady!” The thought filled him with a strange amusement, a satirical sense of the incongruities of life. She whom it had been impossible to tame into any semblance of quiet, vagrant-born and vagrant-bred, a wild creature of the woods as long as she was in the atmosphere where a lady’s demeanour was necessary; and now, in a sphere where it was not necessary--where it brought remark upon her--facing him with that still look, which (he could not deny) was full of a wild gravity and dignity;--he laughed at the strange thought, but the sentiment his laugh expressed was not mirthful: it was the only way in which he could embody the grotesque sense of confusion and bewilderment that rose in his mind. Would she bear that same aspect of dignity, he wondered, if he saw her? Would she know him at a glance, as he had recognised her? Did she know Val? The little picture was like a romance to him. It worked upon him as nothing in his life had done for years.