pertinent remarks to the contrary from her sister,
Aunt Aggie believed herself to be an unsurpassed manager of restricted
means. She constantly advised young married couples as to the judicious
expenditure of money, and pressed on Magdalen the necessity of
retrenching in exasperating directions, namely, where a minute economy
entailed a colossal inconvenience.

In her imagination she saw herself continually consulted, depended on,
strenuously implored to give her opinion on matters of the utmost
delicacy, fervently blessed for her powerful spiritual assistance of
souls in jeopardy, and always gracefully attributing the marvellous
results of her intervention to a Higher Power of which she was but the
unworthy channel.

These imaginary scenes were the unfailing solace of Aunt Aggie's
somewhat colourless life, and the consciousness of them in the
background gave her a certain meek and even patient self-importance, the
basis of which was hidden from Lady Blore.

Aunt Aggie had also another perennial source of chastened happiness in
recalling the romance of her youth, those halcyon days before the
Archdeacon had been unsuccessfully harpooned and put to flight by Lady
Blore.

Her clerical love affair perfumed her conversation, as a knife which has
once associated with an onion inevitably reveals, even in estrangement,
that bygone intimacy.

No one could breathe the word Margate without Aunt Aggie remarking that
she had had a dear friend who had evinced a great partiality for
Margate. Were the clergy mentioned in her presence with the scant
respect with which the ministry and other secular bodies have to put up,
Aunt Aggie vibrated with indignation. _She_ had known men of the highest
talents holding preferment in the Church.

But in her imagination her affair of the heart had passed beyond
reminiscence. Far from being buried in the past it remained the chief
factor in her life, colouring and shaping the whole of her future.

Aunt Aggie could at any moment dip into a kind of sequel to that early
history. In the sequel the Archdeacon's wife was, of course, to die;
but, owing to circumstances which Aunt Aggie had not yet thoroughly
worked out, that unhappy lady was first to undergo tortures in some
remote locality, nursed devotedly--poor thing--by Aunt Aggie. The result
of her ministrations was never in doubt from the first. The Archdeacon's
wife was, of course, to succumb, calling down blessings on the devoted
stranger