which certainly no moralist would condemn.  If only he were more practical, even more commonplace, and wouldn’t talk such nonsense!  Then there would not be such a gulf between them as there was at present; then she might have some influence over him for good, at any rate.  Her thoughts recurred, uneasily, to the strange experiences of that morning.  The mystery of the raps distracted her, puzzled her, frightened her; whereas Austin was not frightened at all—­on the contrary, he accepted the whole thing with the serenest cheerfulness and sang-froid, finding it apparently quite natural that these unseen agencies, coming from nobody knew where, should take him under their protection and make friends with him.  What could it all portend?

Of course it was very foolish of the good lady to fret like this because Austin was so different from what she thought he should be.  She did not see that his nature was infinitely finer and subtler than her own, and that it was no use in the world attempting to stifle his intellectual growth and drag him down to her own level.  A burly, muscular boy, who played football and read ‘Tom Brown,’ would have been far more to her taste, for such a one she would at least have understood.  But Austin, with his queer notions and audacious paradoxes, was utterly beyond her.  Unluckily, too, she had no sense of humour, and instead of laughing at his occasionally preposterous sallies, she allowed them to irritate and worry her.  A person with no sense of humour is handicapped from start to finish, and is as much to be pitied as one born blind or deaf.

But Austin had his limitations too, and among them was a most deplorable want of tact.  Otherwise he would never have said, as he was going to bed that night: 

“By the way, auntie, what day have you arranged for the vicar to come and cast all those devils out of me?”

He might as well have let sleeping dogs lie.  Aunt Charlotte turned round upon him in almost a rage, and solemnly forbade him, in any circumstances and under whatsoever provocation, ever to mention the subject in her presence again.

Chapter the Seventh

But by one of those curious coincidences that occur every now and then, who should happen to drop in the very next afternoon but the vicar himself, just as Austin and his aunt were having tea upon the lawn.  Now Aunt Charlotte and the vicar were great friends.  They had many interests in common—­the same theological opinions, for example; and then Aunt Charlotte was indefatigable in all sorts of parish work, such as district-visiting, and the organisation of school teas, village clubs, and those rather formidable entertainments known as “treats”; so that the two had always something to talk about, and were very fond of meeting.  Besides all this, there was another bond of union between them which scarcely anybody would have guessed.  Mr Sheepshanks, though as