One afternoon when Flushington was engaged over his modest luncheon of bread and butter, potted meat, and lemonade, he suddenly became aware of a sound of unusual voices and a strange flutter of female dresses on the winding stone staircase outside--and was instantly overcome with a cold dread. Now, although there were certainly ladies coming upstairs, there was no reason for alarm; they were probably friends of the man who kept opposite, and was always having his people up. But Flushington had one of those odd presentiments, so familiar to nervous persons, that something unpleasant was at hand; he could not imagine who these ladies might be, but he knew instinctively that they were coming to _him_! If he could only be sure that his outer oak was safely latched! He rose from his chair with wild ideas of rushing to see, of retreating to his bedroom, and hiding under the bed until they had gone. Too late! the dresses were rustling now in his very passage; there was a pause evidently before his inner door, a few faint and smothered laughs, some little feminine coughs, then--two taps. Flushington stood still for a moment, feeling like a caged animal; he had thoughts, even then, of concealment--was there time to get under the sofa? No, it would be too dreadful if the visitors, whoever they were, were to discover him in so unusual a situation. So he ran back to his chair and sat down before crying 'Come in' in a faint voice. He _did_ wish he had been reading anything but the work of M. Zola, which was propped up in front of him, but there was no time to put it away. Your mild man often has a taste for seeing the less reputable side of life in a safe and second-hand way, and Flushington would toil manfully through the most realistic descriptions without turning a hair; now and then he looked out a word in the dictionary, and when it was not to be found there--and it generally wasn't--he had a sense almost of injury. But there was a strong fascination for him in experiencing the sensation of a kind of intellectual orgie, for he knew enough of the language to be aware that the incidents frequently bordered on the improper, even while it was not exactly clear in what the impropriety consisted. As he said 'Come in,' the door opened, and his heart seemed to stop, and all the blood in it rushed violently up to his head, as a large lady came sweeping in, her face rippling with a broad smile of affection. She horrified Flushington, who knew nobody with the smallest claim to smile at him so expansively as that, and he drank lemonade to conceal his confusion. 'You don't know me, my dear Frank,' she said easily; 'why of course you don't; how should you? Well, I'm (for goodness sake, my dear boy, don't look so dreadfully frightened, I don't want to eat you!) I'm your aunt--your Aunt Amelia, you know me now--from Australia, you know!'