much as he loved her in a repressed way, he was cautious with her. For, although Aunt Verona was kind and refrained from scolding or punishing, she had a habit, when he reported his lapses or when she caught him in a misdemeanour, of making remarks to herself. The remarks were often unintelligible, yet Paul dreaded them more than he would have dreaded a reprimand. They seemed to imply that some melody had gone off-key, that he had been guilty of a moral discord. And there was something haunting about her countenance when she was disappointed—all the more so in that her prescription of well-doing was never specifically set forth: one could only surmise its nature by means of the awful, muttering suspension of relations that followed any default. Yet despite its nonspecific quality, despite the fact that Aunt Verona never said "Do this" nor "Don't do that," as other grown-ups were for ever saying, there was something singularly consistent about her negative code. It became more intricate as you learned new facts, but it never contradicted itself. There were blind alleys in Aunt Verona's ethics, and she would often say, "Wait till you're a little older, child, then you'll see what I mean." But he was certain her prophecy would come true, for experience proved that the blank walls which had seemed to bar progress were in reality quite scalable fences beyond which lay inviting new fields. Growing up was largely a matter of discovering that Aunt Verona had been right about all the problems which had baffled one; consequently Paul paid blind homage to her wisdom and writhed whenever he was clumsy enough to bring a shadow across her face—whenever, as it were, he flatted.
He knew, of course, that Aunt Verona would ply him with questions about the morning service, and she was the one person in the world who was never bored when he talked about his experiments with new combinations of stops. If he told her in detail how Miss Todd had
