There are people all round us, only it isn't given to everybody to see them.

And it isn't really very astonishing that it should be so, when one comes to think of it." From that day forward Aunt Charlotte watched Austin with a sense of something akin to awe.

Certainly he was different from other folk.
With all his love of life, his keen interest in his surroundings, and his wealth of boyish spirits, he seemed a being apart--a being who lived not only in this world but on the boundary between this world and another.

As an orthodox Christian woman of course she believed in that other--"another and a better world," as she was accustomed to call it.

But that that world was actually around her, hemming her in, within reach of her fingertips so to speak, that was quite a new idea.
It gave her the creeps, and she strove to put it out of her head as much as possible.