Page:An American Girl in India.djvu/139

 'Which we have always heard is the source of so much disease,' echoed Anne. 'Good gracious!' I exclaimed—if my eyes weren't bulgy, they might well have been—'why on earth did you come if you feel like that?'

A look of great but shy affection that went straight to my heart passed over the faces of all three old ladies.

'We have a nephew,' they said in unison. 'At Mehernugger,' added Martha.

'A civilian,' smiled Jane.

'Whom we haven't seen for five years,' murmured Jane shyly, her face alight with a look of expectation. I felt right down sorry for those three aunts and that nephew straight away. For which I ought to be the more sorry I couldn't tell. That much depended on what like the nephew was. Supposing he was a smart, up-to-date, go-ahead good all-round sort of man, what use could he have in Mehernugger for three old frumps like these, however much he might have loved them in his youth in their own home? Perhaps they had lived in some charming old-fashioned Manor House, where they fitted into the quaint, time-worn setting like some old picture into its age-dimmed frame, where everybody knew them and loved them, and where their dowdiness and their little peculiarities had always been accepted and forgotten. But why—oh, why, hadn't they stayed in that charming old Manor House? Any nephew might have continued to like them there, but in Mehernugger! No man likes owning up to dowdy relatives, and