the exclusion of all smaller topics. He took me up the Hampstead Road almost to the Cobden statue, plunged into some back streets to the left, and came at last to a blistered front door that responded to his latch-key, one of a long series of blistered front doors with fanlights and apartment cards above. We found ourselves in a drab-coloured passage that was not only narrow and dirty but desolatingly empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt sitting at the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboo occasional table before her, and "work"—a plum-coloured walking dress, I judged, at its most analytical stage—scattered over the rest of the apartment.
At the first glance I judged my aunt was plumper than she had been, but her complexion was just as fresh and her China blue eye as bright as in the old days.
"London," she said, didn't "get blacks" on her.
She still "cheeked" my uncle, I was pleased to find. "What are you old Poking in for at this time,—Gubbitt?" she said when he appeared, and she still looked with a practised eye for the facetious side of things. When she saw me behind him, she gave a little cry and stood up radiant. Then she became grave.
I was surprised at my own emotion in seeing her. She held me at arm's length for a moment, a hand on each shoulder, and looked at me with a sort of glad scrutiny. She seemed to hesitate, and then pecked a little kiss off my cheek.
"You're a man, George," she said, as she released me, and continued to look at me for a while.
Their ménage was one of a very common type in London. They occupied what is called the dining-room floor of a small house, and they had the use of a little
