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 made him feel a cad all day. Even if she did nothing with the texts, it was a torture for him to know that there was one spurious text among all the genuine.

Every Sunday morning, immediately after breakfast, Aunt Verona took him to the playroom and gave him a final drill in the anthems and solos for the day, correcting him when he played too fast, and keeping a kind but uncannily vigilant eye on his fourth finger, which, for all the special exercises she had devised, persisted in being weaker than the others—a weakness which made for unsteady trills. Sometimes when he was practising alone she would call out from the kitchen in the middle of an étude, "Paul, Paul, go back two bars. You've left out an A-flat in the bass," and he never ceased wondering how she could unerringly name the note.

He had known for a long while that Aunt Verona was unlike every other creature in Hale's Turning, but he had taken her major oddities for granted. As he grew older he marvelled more and more. He wondered, for instance, why she never went to church, since she took such an interest in its affairs. He had been less offhand in his reports since the day, years ago, when, in reply to her query as to what the Sunday-school teacher had talked about, he had said, "Oh, about Jesus and God and all those!" For on that occasion Aunt Verona had laughed till she cried. He shrank from questioning her about herself, both because he was shy and because he knew she disliked personal questions, which she either evaded or dismissed with a peremptory "I'll tell you some day." In daylight she never ventured farther than the well, and as far back as Paul could remember there had been only three or four occasions, at dead of night, when she had passed through the gate into the street. These ominous sorties had been preceded by long fits of depression. Then Aunt Verona had gone to one of the unused rooms upstairs, put on a veil and some appall-