“Because I saw her only the other day,” said Austin.

For a moment Aunt Charlotte thought he was wool-gathering.  He spoke in such a perfectly calm, natural tone, that he might have been referring to someone who lived in the next street.  But a glance at his face convinced her that he meant exactly what he said.

“Austin!” she exclaimed.  “What can you be thinking about?”

“It’s perfectly true,” he assured her.  “I saw her a few weeks ago in the garden.  She stood and looked at me over the gate, and then suddenly disappeared.”

“And you really believe it?” cried Aunt Charlotte in amaze.

“I don’t believe it, I know it,” he answered, laying down the photograph.  “I saw her as distinctly as I see you now.  It was that day we had been having tea at the vicarage, when we met the man who wanted to set fire to some bishop or other.  Ask Lubin; he’ll remember it fast enough.”

This time Aunt Charlotte fairly collapsed.  It was no longer any use flouting Austin’s statements; they were too calm, too collected, to be disposed of by mere derision.  There could be no doubt that he firmly believed he had seen something or somebody, and whatever might be the explanation of that belief it had enabled him not only to recognise his mother’s photograph but to criticise, and criticise correctly, a certain defect in the portrait.  She could not deny that what he said was true.  “Can such things really be?” she uttered under her breath.

“Dear auntie, they are,” said Austin.  “I’ve been conscious of it for months, and lately I’ve had the proof.  Indeed, I’ve had more than one.  There are people all round us, only it isn’t given to everybody to see them.  And it isn’t really very astonishing that it should be so, when one comes to think of it.”

From that day forward Aunt Charlotte watched Austin with a sense of something akin to awe.  Certainly he was different from other folk.  With all his love of life, his keen interest in his surroundings, and his wealth of boyish spirits, he seemed a being apart—­a being who lived not only in this world but on the boundary between this world and another.  As an orthodox Christian woman of course she believed in that other—­“another and a better world,” as she was accustomed to call it.  But that that world was actually around her, hemming her in, within reach of her fingertips so to speak, that was quite a new idea.  It gave her the creeps, and she strove to put it out of her head as much as possible.  But ere many weeks elapsed, it was forced upon her in a very painful way, and she could no longer ignore the feeling which stole over her from time to time that not only was the boundary between the two worlds a very narrow one, but that her poor Austin would not be long before he crossed it altogether.