at first, but her good nature soon set him at his ease.  She was so strongly biassed in favour of anything young that her heart warmed towards him at once, though his appearance was less prepossessing than she had hoped.  She took him to a cake shop and gave him whatever he liked as soon as she had got him off the school premises; and Ernest felt at once that she contrasted favourably even with his aunts the Misses Allaby, who were so very sweet and good.  The Misses Allaby were very poor; sixpence was to them what five shillings was to Alethea.  What chance had they against one who, if she had a mind, could put by out of her income twice as much as they, poor women, could spend?

The boy had plenty of prattle in him when he was not snubbed, and Alethea encouraged him to chatter about whatever came uppermost.  He was always ready to trust anyone who was kind to him; it took many years to make him reasonably wary in this respect—­if indeed, as I sometimes doubt, he ever will be as wary as he ought to be—­and in a short time he had quite dissociated his aunt from his papa and mamma and the rest, with whom his instinct told him he should be on his guard.  Little did he know how great, as far as he was concerned, were the issues that depended upon his behaviour.  If he had known, he would perhaps have played his part less successfully.

His aunt drew from him more details of his home and school life than his papa and mamma would have approved of, but he had no idea that he was being pumped.  She got out of him all about the happy Sunday evenings, and how he and Joey and Charlotte quarrelled sometimes, but she took no side and treated everything as though it were a matter of course.  Like all the boys, he could mimic Dr Skinner, and when warmed with dinner, and two glasses of sherry which made him nearly tipsy, he favoured his aunt with samples of the Doctor’s manner and spoke of him familiarly as “Sam.”

“Sam,” he said, “is an awful old humbug.”  It was the sherry that brought out this piece of swagger, for whatever else he was Dr Skinner was a reality to Master Ernest, before which, indeed, he sank into his boots in no time.  Alethea smiled and said, “I must not say anything to that, must I?” Ernest said, “I suppose not,” and was checked.  By-and-by he vented a number of small second-hand priggishnesses which he had caught up believing them to be the correct thing, and made it plain that even at that early age Ernest believed in Ernest with a belief which was amusing from its absurdity.  His aunt judged him charitably as she was sure to do; she knew very well where the priggishness came from, and seeing that the string of his tongue had been loosened sufficiently gave him no more sherry.