I looked almost involuntarily at the tall iron gates through which she had passed into my view.  It was true enough—­some of the scroll work was radiant with new gold.

“Well,” I said, “I will give you credit for not wishing to—­to prey upon my aunt.  But still ...”  I was trying to make the thing out.  It struck me that she was an American of the kind that subsidizes households like that of Etchingham Manor.  Perhaps my aunt had even forced her to take the family name, to save appearances.  The old woman was capable of anything, even of providing an obscure nephew with a brilliant sister.  And I should not be thanked if I interfered.  This skeleton of swift reasoning passed between word and word ...  “You are no sister of mine!” I was continuing my sentence quite amiably.

Her face brightened to greet someone approaching behind me.

“Did you hear him?” she said. “Did you hear him, Mr. Churchill.  He casts off—­he disowns me.  Isn’t he a stern brother?  And the quarrel is about nothing.”  The impudence—­or the presence of mind of it—­overwhelmed me.

Churchill smiled pleasantly.

“Oh—­one always quarrels about nothing,” Churchill answered.  He spoke a few words to her; about my aunt; about the way her machine ran—­that sort of thing.  He behaved toward her as if she were an indulged child, impertinent with licence and welcome enough.  He himself looked rather like the short-sighted, but indulgent and very meagre lion that peers at the unicorn across a plum-cake.

“So you are going back to Paris,” he said.  “Miss Churchill will be sorry.  And you are going to continue to—­to break up the universe?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered, “we are going on with that, my aunt would never give it up.  She couldn’t, you know.”

“You’ll get into trouble,” Churchill said, as if he were talking to a child intent on stealing apples.  “And when is our turn coming?  You’re going to restore the Stuarts, aren’t you?” It was his idea of badinage, amiable without consequence.

“Oh, not quite that,” she answered, “not quite that.”  It was curious to watch her talking to another man—­to a man, not a bagman like Callan.  She put aside the face she always showed me and became at once what Churchill took her for—­a spoiled child.  At times she suggested a certain kind of American, and had that indefinable air of glib acquaintance with the names, and none of the spirit of tradition.  One half expected her to utter rhapsodies about donjon-keeps.

“Oh, you know,” she said, with a fine affectation of aloofness, “we shall have to be rather hard upon you; we shall crumple you up like—­” Churchill had been moving his stick absent-mindedly in the dust of the road, he had produced a big “C H U.”  She had erased it with the point of her foot—­“like that,” she concluded.

He laid his head back and laughed almost heartily.

“Dear me,” he said, “I had no idea that I was so much in the way of—­of yourself and Mrs. Granger.”