Mrs. Glenn joined him there at once—ah, that meeting!—and as soon as she had seen him, and talked with the doctors, she became convinced that all that was needed to ensure his recovery was comfort, care and freedom from anxiety. His lungs, the doctors assured her, were all right again; and he had such a passion for the sea that after a few weeks in a good hotel at Montana he had persuaded Mrs. Glenn to come with him to the Mediterranean. But she was firmly resolved on carrying him back to Switzerland for another winter, no matter how much he objected; and Mr. and Mrs. Brown agreed that she was absolutely right—

            “Ah; there’s still a Mr. Brown?”

            “Oh, yes.” She smiled at me absently, her whole mind on Stevie. “You’ll see them both—they’re here with us. I invited them for a few weeks, poor souls. I can’t altogether separate them from Stevie—not yet.” (It was clear that eventually she hoped to.)

            No, I assented; I supposed she couldn’t; and just then she exclaimed: “Ah, there’s my boy!” and I saw a tall stooping young man approaching us with the listless step of convalescence. As he came nearer I felt that I was going to like him a good deal better than I had expected—though I don’t know why I had doubted his likeableness before knowing him. At any rate, I was taken at once by the look of his dark-lashed eyes, deep-set in a long thin face which I suspected of being too pale under the carefully-acquired sunburn. The eyes were friendly, humorous, ironical; I liked a little less the rather hard lines of the mouth, until his smile relaxed them into boyishness. His body, lank and loose-jointed, was too thin for his suit of light striped flannel, and the untidy dark hair tumbling over his forehead adhered to his temples as if they were perpetually damp. Yes, he looked ill, this young Glenn.

            I remembered wondering, when Mrs. Glenn told me her story, why it had not occurred to her that her oldest son had probably joined the American forces and might have remained on the field with his junior. Apparently this tragic possibility had never troubled her. She seemed to have forgotten that there had ever been a war, and that a son of her own, with thousands of young Americans of his generation, had lost his life in it. And now it looked as though she had been gifted with a kind of prescience. The war did not last long enough for America to be called on to give her weaklings, as Europe had, and it was clear that Stephen Glenn, with his narrow shoulders and hectic cheek-bones, could never have been wanted for active service. I suspected him of having been ill for longer than his mother knew.

            Mrs. Glenn shone on him as he dropped down beside us. “This is an old friend, Stephen; a very dear friend of your father’s.” She added, extravagantly, that but for me she and her son might never have found each other. I protested: “How absurd,” and young Glenn, stretching out his long limbs against the sand-back, and crossing his arms behind his head, turned on me a glance of rather weary good-humour. “Better give me a longer trial, my dear, before you thank him.”

            Mrs. Glenn laughed contentedly, and continued, her eyes on her son: “I was telling him that Mr. and Mrs. Brown are with us.”

            “Ah, yes—” said Stephen indifferently. I was inclined to like him a little less for his undisguised indifference. Ought he to have allowed his poor and unlucky foster-parents to be so soon superseded by this beautiful and opulent new mother? But, after all, I mused, I had not yet seen the Browns; and though I had begun to suspect, from Catherine’s tone as well as from Stephen’s, that they both felt the presence of that couple to be vaguely oppressive, I decided that I must wait before drawing any conclusions. And then suddenly Mrs. Glenn said, in a tone of what I can only describe as icy cordiality: “Ah, here they come now. They must have hurried back on purpose—”

              

 

 V.
 
 

            Mr. and Mrs.