Percival had learnt to be accustomed to long silences in his Aunt Maggie and to rescue her from them when need arose. They were familiar, too, to all the villagers and to the "help" who was now required for the domestic work of "Post Offic." Not the same but a very different Miss Oxford had returned to "Post Offic" seven years ago, bringing the news of poor, pretty Miss Audrey's loss of husband and death, and bringing the little mite that was born orphan, bless him. A very different Miss Oxford, for whose characteristic alertness there was substituted a profound quietness, a notable air of absence, preoccupation. It was held by the villagers that she had gone a little bit strange-like. Her sister's death, it was thought, had made her a little touched-like. The "help," a gaunt and stern creature named Honor, who largely devoted herself to bringing up Percival on a system of copy-book and devotional maxims which had become considerably mixed in her mind, called her mistress's lapses into long silence symptoms of an "incline," and in kindly, rough fashion sought to rally her from them. Percival, nearest the truth, called them "thinking." When Aunt Maggie lapsed into such a mood, he would often stand by her, watching her face doubtfully and rather wistfully, with his head a little on one side. Presently he would give a little sigh and run off to his play. It was as though he puzzled to know what occupied her, as though he had some dim, unshaped idea which, while he stood watching, he tried to formulate--and the then little sigh: he could not discover it--yet. What was clear was that nothing ever aroused Aunt Maggie from her strange habit of mind; and that at least is symptom of a dangerous melancholy. What was plain was that her fits of complete, of utter abstraction, embraced her like a sudden physical paralysis in the midst of even an energetic task or an absorbing conversation; and that at least is sign of a lesion somewhere in the faculty of self-control. She divided her time between those periods of "thinking" and an intense devotion to Percival; and the two phases acted directly one upon the other. It was in the midst of loving occupation with the child, that, perhaps at some look in his eyes, perhaps at some note in his voice, abstraction would suddenly strike down upon her; it was from the very depth of such abstraction that she would suddenly start awake and go to find Percival or, he being near her, would take him almost violently into her arms. II In characteristic keeping with this habit, her action when now he ran to her and drew her from the roadway with his cry, "There's a cart coming! A cart, Aunt Maggie!" Her grey, gentle face and her sad eyes irradiated with a sudden colour and sudden light that advertised the affection with which, standing behind him to let the cart pass, she stooped down to him and kissed his glowing cheek--"Would I have been run over, do you think?"