In a moment it was as though I had more than regained the lost ground of lost years.

And in another moment, on the heels of the discovery, came the still more startling one that I was glad to have regained my ground, was thankful to be reinstated, and strangely, acutely, yet uneasily happy, as I had never been since the old days in this very room.
Half in a dream I heard Catherine telling of her boy, of his Eton triumphs, how he had been one of the rackets pair two years, and in the eleven his last, but "in Pop" before he was seventeen, and yet as simple and unaffected and unspoilt with it all as the small boy whom I remembered.

And I did remember him, and knew his mother well enough to believe it all; for she did not chant his praises to organ music, but rather hummed them to the banjo; and one felt that her own demure humour, so signal and so permanent a charm in Catherine, would have been the saving of half-a-dozen Bobs.
"And yet," she wound up at her starting-point, "it's about poor old Bob I want to speak to you!" "Not in a fix, I hope ?" "I hope not, Duncan." Catherine was serious now.
"Or mischief ?" "That depends on what you mean by mischief." Catherine was more serious still.
"Well, there are several brands, but only one or two that really poison--unless, of course, a man is very poor." And my mind harked back to its first suspicion, of some financial embarrassment, now conceivable enough; but Catherine told me her boy was not poor, with the air of one who would have drunk ditchwater rather than let the other want for champagne.
"It is just the opposite," she added: "in little more than a year, when he comes of age, he will have quite as much as is good for him.

You know what he is, or rather you don't.

I do.