of someone descending the twist, and then my aunt
appeared in the doorway with her hand upon the jamb.

"It's Aunt Ponderevo," cried my uncle. "George's wife--and she's brought
over her son!" His eye roamed about the room. He darted to the bureau
with a sudden impulse, and turned the sheet about the patent flat
face down. Then he waved his glasses at us, "You know, Susan, my elder
brother George. I told you about 'im lots of times."

He fretted across to the hearthrug and took up a position there,
replaced his glasses and coughed.

My aunt Susan seemed to be taking it in. She was then rather a pretty
slender woman of twenty-three or four, I suppose, and I remember being
struck by the blueness of her eyes and the clear freshness of her
complexion. She had little features, a button nose, a pretty chin and a
long graceful neck that stuck out of her pale blue cotton morning
dress. There was a look of half-assumed perplexity on her face, a little
quizzical wrinkle of the brow that suggested a faintly amused attempt
to follow my uncle's mental operations, a vain attempt and a certain
hopelessness that had in succession become habitual. She seemed to be
saying, "Oh Lord! What's he giving me THIS time?" And as came to know
her better I detected, as a complication of her effort of apprehension,
a subsidiary riddle to "What's he giving me?" and that was--to borrow a
phrase from my schoolboy language "Is it keeps?" She looked at my mother
and me, and back to her husband again.

"You know," he said. "George."

"Well," she said to my mother, descending the last three steps of the
staircase and holding out her hand! "you're welcome. Though it's a
surprise.... I can't ask you to HAVE anything, I'm afraid, for there
isn't anything in the house." She smiled, and looked at her husband
banteringly. "Unless he makes up something with his old chemicals, which
he's quite equal to doing."

My mother shook hands stiffly, and told me to kiss my aunt....

"Well, let's all sit down," said my uncle, suddenly whistling through
his clenched teeth, and briskly rubbing his hands together. He put up a
chair for my mother, raised the blind of the little window, lowered it
again, and returned to his hearthrug. "I'm sure," he said, as one who
decides, "I'm very glad to see you."

V

As they talked I gave my attention pretty exclusively to my uncle.

I noted him in great detail. I remember now his partially unbuttoned
waistcoat, as though some