It was in vain I assured her that she was mistaken. She only became hysterical and said I was deceiving her; that she saw I had heard it, too. She had been eccentric before, but from this time onwards she became even more so. She would not deal at Brown and Prodgers any more. She would not even pass the shop. She became more penurious than ever. We could hardly persuade servants to stay with us so rigid was she about the dripping. It was all I could do to obtain the necessary money for our economical housekeeping. As the lease of our house was drawing to a close, she decided to move into a flat, thinking it might be cheaper. But when it was all arranged and the lease signed, she refused to go in, because the man who met us there with a selection of wallpapers was, she averred, the same man whom she always spoke of as her murderer. And I believe she was right. I thought I recognised him myself. I asked him if he had not formerly been at Brown and Prodgers, and he replied that he had; but was now employed by Whisk and Blake. After this encounter nothing would induce Aunt Pussy to enter her new home. She had to pay heavily for her changeableness, but she only wrung her hands and paid up. The poor little woman had a hunted look. She evidently thought she had had a great escape. Mark, who did not grow more rational with increasing years, said that this was obviously the psychological moment for us to marry, and drew a vivid picture of the group at the altar--the blushing bridegroom and determined bride, and how when Aunt Pussy saw her murderer step forward as the best man, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, she would die of shock on the spot. And after handsomely remunerating our benefactor, he and I should whisk away in a superb motor, with a gross of shilling cigars on an expensive honeymoon. Six months passed, and there was no talk of any honeymoons. And then the lease of our house came to an end, and Aunt Pussy, having refused to allow any other house or flat to be taken, she was forced to warehouse her furniture, and we had recourse to the miseries of hotel life. Needless to say, we did not go to a quiet residential hotel, but to one of those monster buildings glued on to a railway station, where the inmates come and go every day. Strangely enough, the galvanised activity of hotel existence pleased Aunt Pussy. She called it "seeing life." She even made timid advances to other old ladies, knitting and dozing in the airless seclusion of the ladies' drawing-room, for, of course, we had no sitting-room. I saw plainly enough that we should live in those two small adjoining bedrooms under the roof, looking into a tiled air-shaft, for the remainder of Aunt Pussy's life.