When Strange was announced, she was sitting well screened from the small bright fire, gazing in soft meditation at her plump white hands, with the corners of her mouth slightly drawn downwards, and her smooth round forehead wrinkled up in a way that would have gone to the heart of a stone to see in such a picture of comfort as she was made to be. “Humphrey!” she exclaimed, making a vain try at a spring and flopping down again limply, “Humphrey!” “Myself and no other,” said Strange, receiving her kiss cheerfully, and settling himself into a chair after he had shaken it to see if it would bear. “I needn’t ask you how you are, Aunt Moll, you look just as you always did, like a catkin.” “A what, Humphrey?” she enquired anxiously. “A catkin, we used to call them goslings, soft, oval, pale gold, silky, fluffy masses—you have a weakness for adjectives I know, judging from the line in literature you patronize. The harshest wind has never been known to ruffle a gosling, it always skips them, they always feel warm to the touch, as if the sun were on them, they are delicious things. The sun is always on you, Aunt Moll, ain’t it?” “Ah, Humphrey, you little know, you can make but a faint guess at my troubles, the death of my dear——” “Aunt Moll, we’ll skip that!” interrupted Strange, with a twinkle. He knew quite well what an unmixed relief the deceased peer’s removal was to all his kith and kin, more especially to his wife. “If you recollect, before I went to Algeria we agreed to let my uncle rest undisturbed in his present retreat, which, from what we know of his past, must be unexceptionable—whatever his faults may have been no one can deny that he was a most exclusive person and had a very just notion of his position.” “Dear Humphrey! That flippancy! I had hoped that the many dangers you have experienced, the many times you have come face to face with death—and, Humphrey—with _Eternity_—would have brought the seriousness of life before your eyes.” “Aunt Moll, the sight of you there in that chair brings that view of the case more clearly before me than ever the sight of death did.” Lady Mary again looked anxious, her nephew always made her feel like that, his eyes seemed to rake her from stem to stern and to find some mute amusement in the process. Suddenly she gave a little start. “What have I been thinking of?” she murmured. “Humphrey,” she began again, “we must speak of your prospects.” She was bubbling over with them as it happened, besides, they would keep him off her. “What are you thinking of doing now?” “What I have always been thinking of doing and have never done yet, making the result of my face to face encounters with death—_and Eternity_—of some practical value to the world in general and to myself in particular, by filling my trousers’ pockets, which at this present moment contain one pound six and threepence, and that’s mostly due for beer.” “Humphrey! Have you heard nothing? Your letters?”