“Poor old thing, comfort her!  She never saw a train before, and is regularly overset.”

He put me into the carriage, emptied his pockets of the cat and other trifles, and vanished in the twilight, the old lady gaspingly calling after him, and I soothing her by explaining that he always liked walking home to stretch his legs, while she hoped I was sure, and that it was not want of room.  Truly a man of his size could not well have been squeezed in with her paraphernalia, but I did my best to console the old lady for the absence of her protector, and I began at last to learn, as best I could from her bewildered and entangled speech, how he had arrived, taken the whole management of her affairs, and insisted on carrying her off; but her gratitude was strangely confused with her new railway experiences and her anxieties about her parcels.  I felt as if I had drifted a little bit farther from old times, when we held our heads rather fastidiously high above “odd people.”

But old Mrs. Samuel Alison was a lady, as even Lady Diana allowed; but of a kind nearly extinct.  She had only visited London and Bath once, on her wedding tour, in the days of stage-coaches; there was provincialism in her speech, and the little she had ever been taught she had forgotten, and she was the most puzzle-headed woman I ever encountered.  I do not think she ever realised that it was at Harold’s own expense that her rent and other little accounts had been paid up, nor that Eustace was maintaining her.  She thought herself only on a long visit, and trusted the assurances that Harold was settling everything for ever.  The L30 income which remained to her out of one of L200 served for her pocket-money, and all else was provided for her, without her precisely understanding how; nor did she seem equal to the complications of her new home.  She knew our history in a certain sort of way, but she spoke of one of us to the other as “your brother,” or “your sister,” and the late Mr. Sam always figured as “your poor papa.”  We tried at first to correct her, but never got her farther than “your poor uncle,” and at last we all acquiesced except Eustace, who tried explanations with greater perseverance than effect.  Her excuse always was that Harold was so exactly like her poor dear little Henry, except for his beard, that she could almost think she was speaking to him!  She was somewhat deaf, and did not like to avow it, which accounted for some of her blunders.  One thing she could never understand, namely, why Harold and Eustace had never met her “poor little Henry” in Australia, which she always seemed to think about as big as the Isle of Wight.  He had been last heard of at Melbourne; and we might tell her a hundred times that she might as well wonder we had not met a man at Edinburgh; she always recurred to “I do so wish you had seen my poor dear little Henry!” till Harold arrived at a promise to seek out the said Henry, who, by all appearances, was an unmitigated scamp, whenever he should return to Australia.