“I don’t know what you mean.  Don’t beat about the bush, Austin, and worry my head with all this vague talk about cause and effect and such like.  What has my being illogical got to do with it?”

“Well—­if you want me to explain, of course I’ll do so; but I don’t suppose it’ll make any difference,” said Austin.  “Some time ago, I told you that just as I was going to get over a stile, I felt something push me back, and so I came home another way.  You’ll recollect that if I had got over that stile I should have come across a rabid dog where there was no possibility of escape, and no doubt have got frightfully bitten.  But when I told you how I was prevented, you scoffed at the whole story, and said that I was superstitious.—­Stop a minute!  I haven’t finished yet.—­Then, only the other day, my life was saved from all those bricks tumbling on me when I was asleep by just the same sort of interposition.  Again you jeered at me, and when I told you I had heard raps in the wall you ridiculed the idea, and—­do you remember?—­the words were scarcely out of your mouth when you heard the raps yourself, and then you got nearly beside yourself with fright and anger, and said it was the devil.  And now for the third time the same sort of thing has happened.  What is the good of telling you about it?  You’d only scoff and jeer as you did before, although on this occasion it is your own life that has been saved, not mine.”

Certainly Master Austin was having his revenge on Aunt Charlotte for the torrent of abuse she had poured upon him a few minutes previously.  For a short time she sat quite still, the picture of perplexity and irritation.  The facts as Austin stated them were incontrovertible, and yet—­probably because she lacked the instinct of causality—­she could not accept his explanation of them.  There are some people in the world who are constituted like this.  They create a mental atmosphere around them which is as impenetrable to conviction in certain matters as a brick wall is to a parched pea.  They will fall back on any loophole of a theory, however imbecile and far-fetched, rather than accept some simple and self-evident solution that they start out by regarding as impossible.  And Aunt Charlotte was a very apposite specimen of the class.

“I’ll not scoff, at anyrate, Austin,” she said at last.  “I cannot forget—­and I never will forget—­that it’s to you I owe it that I am sitting here this moment.  Tell me what moved you to act as you did this morning.  I may not share your belief, but I will not ridicule it.  Of that you may rest assured.”

“It is all simple enough,” he said.  “I had a horrid dream just before I woke—­nothing circumstantial, but a general sense of the most awful confusion, and disaster, and terror.  I fancy it was that that woke me.  And as I was opening my eyes, a voice said to me quite distinctly, as distinctly as I am speaking now, ‘Keep auntie at home this morning.’ The words dinned themselves into my ears all the time I was dressing, and then I acted upon them as you know.  But what would have been the good of telling you?  None whatever.  So I tried persuasion, and when that failed I simply locked you in.”