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The sun of St. John's Wood reddened the walls of a substantial sitting-room, and warmed the distracted faces of a family group, sitting in a rather huddled knot, deep in conversation. The birds in the trees outside the open windows sang the sparrow-songs which give the rows of private gardens in this north-west district their rustic sweetness. The shadow of 'That Other Man' lay across the ugly lethargic city, but in the beautiful recesses of St. John's Wood you could believe yourself in the Victorian middleclass paradise, where Mr. Gladstone, big-nosed and big-collared, chopped down trees for longevity, or where the towers of the Crystal Palace looked down upon crinolined throngs moving between the rhododendrons, and stopping to admire the swans upon the glassy lakes.

Could anyone have entered this apartment unperceived, and have stood there observing this agitated group, he would have heard from time to time, phrases in French escaping it, such as à la bonne heure, or par exemple, or mon pauvre petit, mon pauvre petit. This latter phrase in a faint voice fell from the lips of the dominant figure, a very old lady, reminiscent of an ancestral miniature, in her faded dignity. A period costume, of the severest black with the inevitable cameo, was too severe to be English. The pauvre petit of the above-mentioned exclamation was René Harding, who, crouching upon a low boat-like stool at the feet of the aged woman, looked unusually the reverse of petit. But she was his mother: and the intrusion of french phrases in the talk of these three people, of mother, son, and daughter, had a simple explanation. Mrs. Harding senior was French, which accounted also for the gallic Christian name of her son, as it did for many other things about Professor René Harding. René's sister Mary sat close up against Mrs. Harding, on the right-hand side. She was in her early forties, and more obviously handsome, with her well-cut nose and broad forehead, than her brother with his hair-sculptured, gothic mask.