f its own. The sunny air came softly in through
wide-open latticed windows, bringing with it the scent of mignonette.
There had never been a breath of air in the house in Pembridge Square.
_Ole Scorpio_, that friend of my youth, looked peaceful and complacent
in a little recess in which his soft colouring and perfect figure showed
to great advantage against a white-washed wall in shadow.

Aunt Emmy herself, in a gown of some dull white material, with a little
grey in her rippling, parted hair, seemed at home for the first time in
her life. She looked a shade older, a shade thinner in the face, her
sweet eyes a little sunk inwards. But her tall figure had retained all
its old soft dignity and beauty of line. Looking at her as she poured
out my tea for me, I suddenly felt years older than she.

This bewildering impression deepened as the days went on, and a
protecting, wondering compassion became part of my affection for her.

During the years I had spent in India I had seen a good deal of both
sides of that motley, amazing fabric which we call life. I had felt the
throbbing of its great loom. I had touched with my own shrinking hand
the closeness of the texture, had marked the interweaving of the alien
strands, had marvelled and been dismayed, had marvelled and been awed,
had seen the dye of my own blood on one dim thread, the gold of my own
joy on another. The sheltered life had not been mine.

But Aunt Emmy had not moved mentally by a hair's-breadth. All her
expansion, if expansion it could be called, had taken form in her house
and garden. I had not been a week under her roof before I found that Mr.
Kingston occupied exactly the same position in her life as he had done
in Pembridge Square. She had brought down her romance to adorn her new
home just as she had brought down _Ole Scorpio_, in cotton wool. Each
had their niche. Perhaps it was unreasonable in me to expect to find her
different. I had not expected it. But I had become such a totally
different person myself that her attitude to life, which had appeared to
me so romantic and natural when I was eighteen, now appeared
irremediably pathetic, visionary, out of touch with reality. Perhaps,
however, it was I who had become disillusioned and matter-of-fact. I saw
with a kind of pitying wonder that her youthful romance still supplied
to her, as it had done since she was nineteen, a certain atmosphere of
pensive, prayerful resignation, a background for ethereal day-