“I didn’t mean that,” I said, “but the woman who calls herself my sister....”

“My dear nephew,” she interrupted, with tranquil force, as if she were taking an arranged line, “I cannot—­I absolutely cannot be worried with your quarrels with your sister.  As I said to you in my note of this morning, when you are in this town you must consider this house your home.  It is almost insulting of you to go to an inn.  I am told it is even ... quite an unfit place that you are stopping at—­for a member of our family.”

I maintained for a few seconds a silence of astonishment.

“But,” I returned to the charge, “the matter is one of importance.  You must understand that she....”

My aunt stiffened and froze.  It was as if I had committed some flagrant sin against etiquette.

“If I am satisfied as to her behaviour,” she said, “I think that you might be.”  She paused as if she were satisfied that she had set me hopelessly in the wrong.

“I don’t withdraw my invitation,” she said.  “You must understand I wish you to come here.  But your quarrels you and she must settle.  On those terms....”

She had the air of conferring an immense favour, as if she believed that I had, all my life through, been waiting for her invitation to come within the pale.  As for me, I felt a certain relief at having the carrying out of my duty made impossible for me.  I did not want to tell my aunt and thus to break things off definitely and for good.  Something would have happened; the air might have cleared as it clears after a storm; I should have learnt where I stood.  But I was afraid of the knowledge.  Light in these dark places might reveal an abyss at my feet.  I wanted to let things slide.

My aunt had returned to her accounts, the accounts which were the cog-wheels that kept running the smooth course of the Etchingham estates.  She seemed to wish to indicate that I counted for not very much in the scheme of things as she saw it.

“I should like to make your better acquaintance,” she said, with her head still averted, “there are reasons....”  It came suddenly into my head that she had an idea of testamentary dispositions, that she felt she was breaking up, that I had my rights.  I didn’t much care for the thing, but the idea of being the heir of Etchingham was—­well, was an idea.  It would make me more possible to my pseudo-sister.  It would be, as it were, a starting-point, would make me potentially a somebody of her sort of ideal.  Moreover, I should be under the same roof, near her, with her sometimes.  One asks so little more than that, that it seemed almost half the battle.  I began to consider phrases of thanks and acceptance and then uttered them.

I never quite understood the bearings of that scene; never quite whether my aunt really knew that my sister was not my sister.  She was a wonderfully clever woman of the unscrupulous order, with a sang-froid and self-possession well calculated to let her cut short any inconvenient revelations.  It was as if she had had long practice in the art, though I cannot say what occasion she can have had for its practice—­perhaps for the confounding of wavering avowers of Dissent at home.