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A sudden rage rose within me against the deceased Uncle Thomas, and against this other decrepit uncle, waiting to be nursed.

I laid down the photographs, and went a turn in the forest, leaving Aunt Emmy sitting idle in her gardening gloves. My foolish words had stopped her happy activity. I was angry with myself, with Fate, with Australia, with everything, and not least with Mr. Kingston.

Everywhere in the bare glades little orphaned families of bracken held their arched necks a few inches from the ground. Even in their bereavement they too had remembered that it was autumn, and their tiny curled fronds protecting their downcast faces were golden and ruddy. As I turned a corner I suddenly caught sight of Mr. Kingston a few paces from me, looking earnestly at one of these little groups. I did not want to meet him just then, and I half turned aside; but he had already seen me, and he gave a gesture of welcome, and I had to stop.

My anger subsided somewhat as he came up. He looked harassed, and as if he had not slept.

“And so you are back,” he said. “I was just wishing that you were at the moment I caught sight of you. If you think it possible that a word or two could be dragged out of such a silent enigmatical person as yourself, I should like to have a little talk with you.”

I could not help liking him. His keen eyes were kindly, though his face was grave.

“What do you want to talk about?” I said bluntly.

“What an unnecessary question. What can I want to talk about except Emmy?”

I was silent. I felt more uncomfortable about the whole affair than I had done yet, and that was saying a good deal.

Mr. Kingston led the way down a little track to a place where the trees grew so close together that the murderous scythes had not been able to get in among them. Here the bracken had been unmolested, and was going unharassed through all its most gorgeous pageant. Great fronds of ivory white, of palest gold, of brownest gold, of reddest gold upreared themselves among the purple waves of the heather, wearing the stray flecks of the sunshine like jewels on their breasts. We sat down on a fallen tree round which the bracken had wrapped its splendour.

“How extraordinarily beautiful it is!” he said, more to himself than to me, putting out his long, artistic hand, gnarled and hardened with work, and touching a pale frond with a reverent finger. “I am glad to have seen it once more. It is twenty-five years since I have seen an English autumn.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then he went on without any change of tone:

“And you are thinking, you sad-faced, downright little woman who are so afraid that I am going to make your dear Aunt Emmy unhappy, you are thinking that you did not take a precarious seat on this trunk in order to hear a possible enemy descant on the beauties of nature.”

I was astonished at his penetration. My own experience, gleaned entirely from the genial little egotist whose wife I was, had taught me that men never noticed anything. I had had no idea that I had shown the fear of him which I felt.

“And yet you are my only possible ally,” he went on, “my only helper, if you are willing to help me, in the somewhat difficult task which I have in hand.”

“You mean, marrying my aunt?” I said.

“No,” he said, looking at me with a kindness which made me ready to sink into the ground with shame. “I can do that without assistance. Emmy, God bless her! has been ready to marry me any time these twenty-five years, and, poor soul, she is ready now. She has not the faintest idea what she would be in for if she did, but she is ready to risk it.”