'She is my great-aunt, really. She lives in Little Swithun, right at the back of Dean's Close; and her name is on a brass plate—a very hard name to pronounce, "Miss Lapenotiere, Dancing and Calisthenics"—that's another hard word, but it means things you do with an elastic band to improve your figure. The plate doesn't azackly tell the truth, because she has been an invalid for years now, and Aunt Netta—that's my other aunt—had to carry on the business. But everybody knows about it, so there really is no deceit. Aunt Netta's name is Wallas, and so is mine. Her mother was sister to Aunt Louisa, and she tells us we come of very good family. She never married. I don't believe she ever wanted to marry anybody but you, and now it's too late. But I call it splendid, your turning up like this. And on Christmas Eve, to!'
'It's beginning to be splendid,' owned the colonel, who had partly recovered himself. 'Unhappily—since you put it so—it is, I fear, a fact that I never met your Aunt Louisa.'
'Oh! but you did—in the street, and once in the post office, when you were a boy at the college.'
'Such impressions are fleeting, my dear, as you will live to prove.
Your other aunt, Miss Netta—'
'Oh! she will have been born after your time,' said the child, with calm, unconscious cruelty. 'But you will see her presently. She has gone to the bar to pay the bill, and when she has finished disputing it she is bound to call for me.'
As if it had been waiting to confirm the prophecy, a voice called,
'Charis! Charis!' almost on the instant.
'That's my name,' said the child, helping herself to another fig, as a middle-aged face, wrinkled, with a complexion of parchment under a mass of tow-coloured hair, peered in at the doorway.
The colonel rose. 'Your niece, madam,' he began, 'has been entertaining me for these ten minutes—'
With that he stopped, perceiving that, after a second glance at him, the eyes of Aunt Netta, too, were growing round in her head.
'Charis, you naughty child! Sir, I do hope—but she has been troubling you, I am sure—' stammered Aunt Netta, and came to a full stop.