“It does my heart good to see you, dears,” Aunt Anne said, as she insisted on helping them to an enormous quantity of stewed cranberries.
“And it does us good to be here,” they answered, forgetting all their vexation at losing a day by the sea; forgetting even the poor chicken that was being roasted in vain, and the waiting fly to be paid for at so much an hour.
“Walter dear,” Mrs. Hibbert said, as they drove back to Brighton, carefully balancing on their knees four large pots of jam, while they also kept an eye on an enormous nosegay badly tied up, that wobbled about on the back seat, “Mr. Baines didn’t seem to know you when we arrived.”
“He had never set eyes on me before. Aunt Anne only set eyes on him five years ago. He was rather a grumpy beggar. I wonder who the deuce he was? We none of us ever knew.”
“He didn’t know you were a journalist, I think.”
“No, I suppose not. I wonder if he ever did anything for a living himself?” Then, as if he repented saying anything that sounded unkind of a man whose salt he had just eaten, he added, “But you can never tell what people are from their talk the first time you see them. He is not unlike a man I knew some years ago, who was a great inventive genius. He used to shuffle about in shoes too big for him, just as this beggar did.”
“I felt quite frightened when he first came round the corner.”
“You see it was rough upon him having his morning spoilt. A man who lives in the country like that generally gets wrapped up in his surroundings. I suppose I must have known that Aunt Anne was at Rottingdean,” he went on; “but if so, I had forgotten it. She quarrelled with my father and every one else because she was always quite unable to keep any money. There was a great deliberation in the family a few years ago, when it was announced that Aunt Anne was destitute and no one wanted to keep her.”
“But had she no money of her own?”
“She had a little, but she lived on the capital till it was gone, and there was an end of that. Then suddenly she married Mr. Baines. I don’t know who he was, but she met him at a railway station. He had a bad headache, I believe, and she thought he was ill, and went up and offered him some smelling-salts.”