“Dear auntie, I won’t laugh any more, I promise you,” said Austin.  “I’m sure he’ll turn out a most courtly old personage, and perhaps he’ll have an enormous fortune that he made by shaking pagoda-trees in India.  How do pagodas grow on trees, I wonder?  I always thought a pagoda was a sort of odalisque—­isn’t that right?  Oh, I mean obelisk—­with beautiful flounces all the way up to the top.  It seems a funny way of making money, doesn’t it.  Where is India, by the bye?  Anywhere near Peru?”

“Your ignorance is positively disgraceful, Austin,” said Aunt Charlotte, with great severity.  “I only hope you won’t talk like that in the presence of Mr Ogilvie.  I expect you’re right in surmising that he’s been a great traveller, for he says himself that he has led a very wandering, restless life, and he would be shocked to think I had a nephew who didn’t know how to find India upon the map.  There, you’ve had quite as many cherries as are good for you, I’m sure.  Let us go and see if it’s dry enough to have our coffee on the lawn, while Martha clears away.”

Now although Austin was intensely tickled at the idea of Aunt Charlotte having had a love-affair, and a love-affair that appeared to threaten renewal, the fact was that he really felt just a little anxious.  Not that he believed for a moment that she would be such a goose as to marry, at her age; that, he assured himself, was impossible.  But it is often the very things we tell ourselves are impossible that we fear the most, and Austin, in spite of his curiosity to see his aunt’s old flame, looked forward to his arrival with just a little apprehension.  For some reason or other, he considered himself partly responsible for Aunt Charlotte.  The poor lady had so many limitations, she was so hopelessly impervious to a joke, her views were so stereotyped and conventional—­in a word, she was so terribly Early Victorian, that there was no knowing how she might be taken in and done for if he did not look after her a bit.  But how to do it was the difficulty.  Certainly he could not prevent the elderly swain from calling, and, of course, it would be only proper that he himself should be absent when the two first came together.  A tete-a-tete between them was inevitable, and was not likely to be decisive.  But, this once over, he would appear upon the scene, take stock of the aspirant, and shape his policy accordingly.  What sort of a man, he wondered, could Mr Ogilvie be?  He had actually passed through the town not so very long ago; but then so had hundreds of strangers, and Austin had never noticed anyone in particular—­certainly no one who was in the least likely to be the gentleman in question.  There was nothing to be done, meanwhile, then, but to wait and watch.  Perhaps the gentleman would not want to marry Aunt Charlotte after all.  Perhaps, as she herself had suggested, he had a wife and family already.  Neither of them knew anything at all about him.  He might be a battered old