Up to this point our gathering had had its distinctly amusing side. With consummate dissembling he had turned us round his finger, and it would have taken a conjurer to guess that he was softly laughing at all of us except Jennie. But the more I considered the "line" I had on his subtle machinations the less a laughing matter it all became. Behind the gentle deference of his manner I felt the grimmest determination. His charm was the charm of a charming youth, but it rested on the hard experience and resolution of a man. And behind that again in the last resort menace would lie. This man, actually older than Madge, not much younger than Alec and myself, and a full quarter of a century older than Jennie, had toiled for fame and had missed the fruits of it; he had chased the will-o'-the-wisp pleasure and had floundered in the bog; but now he had seen the shining thing beside which fame and pleasure are nothing at all. To seize that was now the whole intention of his marvellous twice-lived life. Let him keep his eyes as he would from looking directly at Jennie, Jennie was there, the prize for which he strove. And I knew in my soul that were I or another to try to frustrate him we had better look to ourselves. It was a thing none the less to beware of that his brow was smooth, his eyes bright, his skin clear as the skin of a boy. And all in a moment I found myself looking at him with--I don't know how else to express it--a sort of induced unfamiliarity. All the strangeness of it came over me again like a wave. I knew that I didn't know him in the least. Behind that mask he knew infinitely more about me than I knew about him. He sat with his back to the sea, and the tartan of tricky shadow laced his brow, was lost again as his face dipped, reappeared on the navy-blue sleeve and his brown hand on the table. Yes, completely a stranger to me. I his father? He was his own father. What else did all that turgid stuff in _The Times_ about "maximum faculties" mean? New words for old things! "The boy is father of the man." They of old time knew it all before us. We only think it is truer to-day because more people talk about it. Here, incipient and scarcely veiled, was the real parent of the Derwent Rose of _The Vicarage of Bray_, _An Ape in Hell_, and all else he had ever done. Here, implicitly and in embryo, were the wit of the _Vicarage_, the patient purpose of _Esau_, and the deadly suppressed anger of the _Ape_. Possibly you have never seen, brightly and sunnily displayed with a light and laughing lazy-tongs of rippling shadow, the authentic beginning of a man you have known twenty-five years farther on in time. Perhaps it is as well that they who have seen it are few. You may take my word for it that that family tree of which the roots are Arnaud and the blossoms Rose can be a rather terrifying thing.