Mrs. Clapham said nothing while the smooth voice held blandly on, full of that strange something that always hinted but never spoke. With the shining frame in her worn hands she sat staring at the shadowed young face that she remembered so well. Her duplicate copy at home had never risen to a frame, but when she took it out of its drawer in the sunny kitchen it always seemed to her to smile. Here, however, imprisoned a second time in the House of Pain, there was no vestige of laughter on Poor Stephen’s lips. They were haunted eyes that looked at her out of the costly frame, and that day by day watched Emma stealing about the room. There was courage in the set of the figure and the line of the shut mouth, but there was neither exhilaration nor even hope. Over the whole printed presentment which was all that the War had left, was the unmistakable stamp of his unforgettable past. “I thought happen you mightn’t have seen it.... You’ve not been near me for so long....” Emma’s voice was still flowing smoothly from hint to hint, gently conveying reproach for a wrong to a bereaved mother (‘and her a widow’) which even a real live lordship had been too human to commit. “There’s a deal of others besides ... some on ’em when he was a Tommy ... ay, and after he got his stripe ... ay, and here’s one wi’ his platoon.” The Army terms came easily from her lips, as they had come from so many mothers’ lips during the War, and the woman who had had no son from whom to learn them felt a second twinge of shame. “Here’s t’ card they sent for putting in winder to say as your son had joined up; and this here’s what t’ Mothers’ Union presented to them as had lost their lads.... Ay, and here’s Libby’s and Stevie’s photos, as took his lordship so aback. I reckon there’s no mistaking they’re Stephen Catterall’s barns.” The little roundabout figure passed from spot to spot, handing the precious objects to Mrs. Clapham, who received them silently, setting them on her knee, and thinking, as many were thinking, now that the War was done, how small were these relics of those terrible years. Also she thought of what Emma did not know, that it was only after a fight with herself that Tibbie had sent the pictures at all. As for the offering from the Mothers’ Union, she knew very well what the Vicar’s wife, who was its head, had had to say about _that_! She could have laughed, even now, recalling Mrs. Wrench’s disgust when faced with Emma’s name on that royal list.