And all these causes were harmless.
It is a flattering thing to say, and it was not Oswald who said it, but Dora.

She said she was certain our uncle missed us, and that he felt he could no longer live without seeing his dear ones (that was us).
Anyway, he came down, without warning, which is one of the few bad habits that excellent Indian man has, and this habit has ended in unpleasantness more than once, as when we played jungles.
However, this time it was all right.

He came on rather a dull kind of day, when no one had thought of anything particularly amusing to do.

So that, as it happened to be dinner-time and we had just washed our hands and faces, we were all spotlessly clean (com-pared with what we are sometimes, I mean, of course).
We were just sitting down to dinner, and Albert's uncle was just plunging the knife into the hot heart of the steak pudding, when there was the rumble of wheels, and the station fly stopped at the garden gate.

And in the fly, sitting very upright, with his hands on his knees, was our Indian relative so much beloved.