And yet, in his own peculiar way, he was a good nephew to his aunt. He was the meekest, ugliest, shyest, awkwardest of men. His curacy was at a place on the Suffolk coast called Swaffham-on-Sea. From these wilds he was perpetually being summoned by his aunt to attend on her in her house in town. Although--possibly because he was that kind of man--these visits were anything but occasions of pleasure, he generally obeyed the summons. On the present occasion it was the second day of his stay under his aunt's hospitable roof in Cadogan Place. From the moment of his arrival she had continually reviled him. She had suggested as wives some two-score eligible young women, from earls' daughters to confectioners' assistants. She had arrived at that state of mind in which, if he would only marry, she would have welcomed a cook. In his awkward, stammering way, he had vetoed them all. Then she had rated him for an hour and three-quarters by the clock. Finally, exhausted by her efforts, she had caught up the paper in a rage. The Rev. Alan watched her in silence as she read it, fingering a little book of prayers he had in his waistcoat pocket. All at once she had thrust the advertisement sheet of the paper underneath his nose, with the exclamation-- "Look at that!" He looked at it, and had read the advertisement reproduced above. "Don't sit there like a stuck dummy," observed Miss Macleod, whose English, in her moments of excitement, was more than peculiar. "Go and get the thing that you call a hat! Hat!" Miss Macleod sniffed; "if you had appeared in the streets in _my_ days with such a thing on your head, people would have thought that Guy Fawkes's day was come again." The Rev. Alan was still studying the paper. "But, my dear aunt, you are not seriously thinking of paying any attention to such an advertisement as that?" "And why not? Isn't the man a clergyman?" "I can't think that a priest--" "A priest!" cried Miss Macleod, to whom the word was as a red rag to a bull. "Who spoke about a priest?" The Rev. Alan went placidly on-- "--under any circumstances would advertise apostle spoons for sale." "Who asks you what you think? Put on your hat and come with me." "There is another point. The advertisement says 'letters only'; there is evidently an objection to a personal call." As Miss Macleod grasped her nephew by the shoulder with a sufficiently muscular grasp, the Rev. Alan put on his hat and went with her. CHAPTER II--UNDER THE SPELL