Uncle Rudolph had taken me up the mountain only to talk of Dolly. Incredible as it may seem, he has fallen in love. At first sight. At sixty. I am sure a woman can't do that, so that this by itself convinces me he is a man. Three days ago I wrote in this very book that a dean isn't quite my idea of a man. I retract. He is. Well, while I was shrinking and shivering on my own account, waiting for him to begin digging about among my raw places, he said instead, 'How does she spell it?' and threw my thoughts into complete confusion. Blankly I gazed at him while I struggled to rearrange them on this new basis. It was such an entirely unexpected question. I did not at this stage dream of what had happened to him. It never would have occurred to me that Dolly would have so immediate an effect, simply by sitting there, simply by producing her dimple at the right moment. Attractive as she is, it is her ways rather than her looks that are so adorable; and what could Uncle Rudolph have seen of her ways in so brief a time? He has simply fallen in love with a smile. And he sixty. And he one's uncle. Amazing Dolly; irresistible apparently, to uncles. 'Do you mean Mrs. Jewks's name?' I asked, when I was able to speak. 'Yes,' said my uncle. 'I haven't seen it written,' I said, restored so far by my relief--for Dolly had saved me--that I had the presence of mind to hedge. I was obliged to hedge. In my mind's eye I saw Mrs. Barnes's face imploring me. 'No doubt,' said my uncle after another silence, 'it is spelt on the same principle as Molyneux.' 'Very likely,' I agreed. 'It sounds as though her late husband's family might originally have been French.' 'It does rather.' 'Possibly Huguenot.' 'Yes.' 'I was much astonished that she should be a widow.' '_Yet not one widow but two widows...._' ran at this like a refrain in my mind, perhaps because I was sitting so close to a dean. Aloud I said, for by now I had completely recovered, 'Why, Uncle Rudolph? Widows do abound.' 'Alas, yes. But there is something peculiarly virginal about Mrs. Jewks.' I admitted that this was so. Part of Dolly's attractiveness is the odd impression she gives of untouchedness, of gay aloofness. My uncle broke off a stalk of the withered last summer's grass and began nibbling it. He was lying on his side a little below me, resting on his elbow. His black, neat legs looked quaint stuck through the long yellow grass. He had taken off his hat, hardy creature, and the wind blew his grey hair this way and that, and sometimes flattened it down in a fringe over his eyes. When this happened he didn't look a bit like anybody good, but he pushed it back each time, smoothing it down again with an abstracted carefulness, his eyes fixed on the valley far below. He wasn't seeing the valley. 'How long has the poor young thing--' he began. 'You will be surprised to hear,' I interrupted him, 'that Mrs. Jewks is forty.'