Though they met often, their friendship grew slowly. But it did grow. Ronald was as shy as a schoolboy. He foresaw or imagined the approach of a snub and drew back long before it reached him. He showed Mrs. Vernon his flat, his small collection of etchings, his few valuable books. They went together to hear lectures at the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Lonely himself, having few friends even at his Club, suffering often from the after-effects of enteric fever, which he had developed during the Boer War, Ronald yet thought of Mrs. Vernon’s life as being lonelier still. At times, he pictured her as a sort of nun. She seemed so serene and calm. Once she had told him smilingly that her maid had given notice and been gone a week. She had been living, she said, on fruit. She liked it. She was in no hurry to get another. Ronald had been seriously alarmed. He was sure that she would be utterly careless about food, perhaps forget to eat altogether. She might make herself really ill. She looked as fragile as air. Yet he dared not say anything, lest he should seem to intrude upon her life. It was only by casual and tentative questions that he later ascertained that another maid had been found. Going to tea with Mrs. Vernon a few days after this, he saw the new maid for himself and was infinitely relieved.

For some time he had no idea that Mrs. Vernon had a son. When she did at length refer to him it was quite casually, and yet Ronald felt at once that behind her assumed indifference there was a tragedy. She spoke about something he had done as a boy, and it was as if she were talking of someone who had died. Evidently there was some shady business. Perhaps he’d forged a cheque. Probably worse. Was living in disgrace. And it must have broken his mother’s heart. Ronald was a mild man, but he felt himself utterly without mercy in his judgment of that young bounder, who’d behaved so vilely to her. The only thing that could be said for him was that he had the decency not to show himself.

She had spoken to Ronald on more than one occasion of an old house in Cheshire where, he gathered, she had stayed for some years since her widowhood. It was the house of her husband’s people. She showed him some of her water-colour drawings of it. And now, she said, this house was shut up and empty, in the hands of caretakers. When she spoke of it, her eyes had tears in them.