“No, not just at first, though I suspected, I suspected. But your manner of speaking is different. But as I look at you now I find you wonderfully little changed. Just bring me that picture of him when he was a boy, Nellie.” Nellie obeyed with alacrity, and returned with a faded photograph in a magnificent silver and enamel frame. It represented a stout little boy in Highland costume, in which Vickers could not see the smallest resemblance to himself. The old man, however, regarded it with tender, almost tearful eyes. “Truly the boy is father to the man,” he said. “Just the same expression, isn’t it?” Vickers turned away with an exclamation of irritation which he could not repress, and Nellie asked maliciously, “You do not find Bob any taller than he was when he went away, do you, Uncle?” “Taller, Nellie? Why, of course not. Men don’t grow after they are twenty-three or four. What are you thinking of? He has filled out a good deal. That gives him an appearance of greater size. Sit down here, my boy. Nellie tells me you insisted on going to work at once. I suppose that is right, but I must admit I was a little disappointed. I had hoped for one day of your society.” During dinner the conversation was carried on chiefly between the two men. Before they rose from the table, Plimpton approached Vickers to say that Mrs. Raikes had telephoned to ask if Mr. Robert Lee would dine with her the next evening at eight. Vickers replied that Mr. Robert Lee would be graciously minded to do so, and was delighted to see a shade of some sort settle on Nellie’s brow. The dinner was the first of many--not only with Mrs. Raikes, but with other people. Indeed Vickers had--what is so rare in a large city like New York--a sudden and conspicuous social success. He was good-looking, he was amusing, he did not care very much what he said, or whether he were liked or not, and the result was that he had more invitations than he could accept. It was the first of April, and that short, pleasant spring season that New York social life has lately known, had set in. The winter was over, many people had gone away, but a small group of those left behind drew closer together and felt a rare impulse to be intimate. The Park was turning green, the country clubs were pleasant objects for motor trips,--altogether there was a good deal of an agreeable and informal nature to be done, and all of it Lee was asked to share. The strange feature of it all was that there was a general understanding that Nellie and her cousin were not upon cordial terms, and that they could not both be asked on the same party. The result was that Nellie spent more time at home alone than she was accustomed to. Mr. Lee, who had always been absolutely unconscious where or how much Nellie went out, took the keenest interest in his son’s comings and goings, and would often express to Nellie a pride in his popularity which she found rather hard to bear. Emmons disapproved intensely.