ties
that suggested the kind of trouble it had been; and he settled down
among us to a solitude only broken in the holidays of his only child,
then a boy of twelve at a preparatory school.

I first heard of the boy's existence when Coplestone chose the papers
for his house. Anything seemed good enough for the "three
reception-rooms and usual offices"; but over a bedroom and a play room
on the first floor we were an hour deciding against every pattern in the
books, and then on the exact self-colour to be obtained elsewhere. It
was at the end of that hour that a chance remark, about the evening
paper and the latest cricket, led to a little conversation,
insignificant in itself, yet enough to bring Coplestone and me into
touch about better things than house decoration. Often after that, when
he came down of an afternoon, he would look in at the office and leave
me his _Pall Mall_. And he brought the boy in with him on the first day
of the midsummer holidays.

"Ronnie's a keen cricketer at present," said Coplestone on that
occasion. "But he's got to be a wet-bob like his old governor when he
goes on to Eton. That's what we're here for, isn't it, Ronnie? We're
going to take each other on the river every blessed day of the
holidays."

Ronnie beamed with the brightest little face in all the world. He had
bright brown eyes and dark brown hair, and his skin burnt a delicate
brown instead of the paternal pink. His expression was his father's, but
not an atom of his colouring. His mother must have been a brunette and a
beautiful woman. I could not help thinking of her as I looked at the
beaming boy who seemed to have forgotten his loss, if he had ever
realised it. And yet it was just a touch of something in his face, a
something pensive and constrained, when he was not smiling, that gave
him also such a look of Coplestone at times.

But as a rule Ronnie was sizzling with happiness and excitement; and it
was my privilege to see a lot of him those hot holidays. Coplestone did
not go away for a single night or day. Most mornings one met him and his
boy in flannels, on their way down to the river, laden with their lunch.
But because the exclusive society of the best of boys must eventually
bore the most affectionate of men, I was sometimes invited to join the
picnic, and on Saturdays and Sundays I accepted more than once. Those,
however, were the days on which I was nearly always bespoke by Uvo
Delavoye, and once when I said so i