it brought back
Radmore's boyhood and early manhood days! But in those days it was Tom,
a simple cherubic-looking little boy of seven, who said grace--the usual
"For what we are going to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful!"
The stranger--how queer to think he was a stranger here, in this familiar
room--did not care for the innovation.

They all sat down, and Radmore began to eat his soup, served in a covered
cup. It was very good soup, and as he was rather tired and hungry, he
enjoyed it. Then Timmy got up and removed the cup and its cover; and
suddenly the guest became aware that only four people at the table had
taken soup--himself, Mr. Tosswill, Jack, and Timmy. What an odd thing!

They were all rather silent, and Radmore began to have a strange, uncanny
feeling that none of them could see him, that he was a wraith, projected
out of the past into the present. It was a novel and most disconcerting
sensation. But no one glancing at his keen face, now illumined with a
half humorous expression of interest, would have guessed the mixed and
painful feelings which possessed him.

He stole a look to his left. Janet, in his eyes, was almost unchanged. Of
course she looked a thought older, a thought thicker--not so much in her
upright figure, as in her clever, irregular-featured face. In the days of
his early manhood she had never seemed to him to be very much older than
himself--but now she looked a lifetime older than he felt.

Only Mr. Tosswill looked absolutely unchanged. His mild benevolent face,
his deep blue eyes, his grey hair, seemed exactly the same as when
Radmore had last sat down, in the Old Place dining-room, to a full table.
That had been in the Christmas holidays of 1910. Very well he remembered
all that had happened then, for he and Betty had just become engaged.

At nineteen Betty Tosswill had belonged to the ideal type of
old-fashioned English girlhood--high-spirited, cheerful, artless yet
intelligent, with a strong sense of humour. She had worn a pink evening
frock during those long-ago Christmas holidays, and had looked, at any
rate in her young lover's eyes, beautiful.

They had been ardently, passionately in love, he a masterful, exacting
lover, and though seeming older than his age, without any of the
magnanimity which even the passage of only a very few years brings to
most intelligent men. Poor little Betty of long ago--what a child she
had been at nineteen!--but a child capable of deep