Her thoughts recurred, uneasily, to the strange experiences of that morning.

The mystery of the raps distracted her, puzzled her, frightened her; whereas Austin was not frightened at all--on the contrary, he accepted the whole thing with the serenest cheerfulness and _sang-froid_, finding it apparently quite natural that these unseen agencies, coming from nobody knew where, should take him under their protection and make friends with him.

What could it all portend?
Of course it was very foolish of the good lady to fret like this because Austin was so different from what she thought he should be.
She did not see that his nature was infinitely finer and subtler than her own, and that it was no use in the world attempting to stifle his intellectual growth and drag him down to her own level.

A burly, muscular boy, who played football and read 'Tom Brown,' would have been far more to her taste, for such a one she would at least have understood.

But Austin, with his queer notions and audacious paradoxes, was utterly beyond her.