ill continued. She had met
everybody yesterday.

"Yes," I said, non-committally. I wondered what had happened at that
meeting. My aunt and I had never been upon terms. She was a great
personage in her part of the world, a great dowager land-owner, as poor
as a mouse, and as respectable as a hen. She was, moreover, a keen
politician on the side of Miss Churchill. I, who am neither land-owner,
nor respectable, nor politician, had never been acknowledged--but I knew
that, for the sake of the race, she would have refrained from enlarging
on my shortcomings.

"Has she found a companion to suit her yet?" I said, absent-mindedly. I
was thinking of an old legend of my mother's. Miss Churchill looked me
in between the eyes again. She was preparing to relabel me, I think. I
had become a spiteful humourist. Possibly I might be useful for platform
malice.

"Why, yes," she said, the faintest of twinkles in her eyes, "she has
adopted a niece."

The legend went that, at a hotly contested election in which my aunt had
played a prominent part, a rainbow poster had beset the walls. "Who
starved her governess?" it had inquired.

My accidental reference to such electioneering details placed me upon an
excellent footing with Miss Churchill. I seemed quite unawares to have
asserted myself a social equal, a person not to be treated as a casual
journalist. I became, in fact, not the representative of the _Hour_--but
an Etchingham Granger that competitive forces had compelled to accept a
journalistic plum. I began to see the line I was to take throughout my
interviewing campaign. On the one hand, I was "one of us," who had
temporarily strayed beyond the pale; on the other, I was to be a sort of
great author's bottle-holder.

A side door, behind Miss Churchill, opened gently. There was something
very characteristic in the tentative manner of its coming ajar. It
seemed to say: "Why any noisy vigour?" It seemed to be propelled by a
contemplative person with many things on his mind. A tall, grey man in
the doorway leaned the greater part of his weight on the arm that was
stretched down to the handle. He was looking thoughtfully at a letter
that he held in his other hand. A face familiar enough in caricatures
suddenly grew real to me--more real than the face of one's nearest
friends, yet older than one had any wish to expect. It was as if I had
gazed more intently than usual at the face of a man I saw daily, and had
found him older and greye