"However, all this doesn't help me with the Minimum Wage," he continued, and he turned again to the papers on his desk by the window, while Elsie at the table in the middle of the big low-roofed room, continued to write her letters.
They were still engaged in these pursuits when Mrs. Tyson, their landlady, came into the room to lower the blinds.
"No, please leave them up," said Endicott, in an irritable voice. "I'll draw them down myself before we go to bed."
Mrs. Tyson accordingly left the blinds alone.
"And you'll be careful of the Crown Derby," she said imperturbably, nodding towards a china tea-set ranged in an open cabinet near to the door. "Gentlemen from London have asked me to sell it over and over. For it's of great value. But I won't, as I promised my mother. She, poor woman----"
"Yes, yes," interposed Mr. Endicott, "we'll be very careful. You may remember you told us all about it yesterday."
Mrs. Tyson turned down a little lower the one oil lamp which, with the candles upon Endicott's desk, lighted the room, and went back to the inner door.
"Will you be wanting anything more for a little while?" she asked. "For my girl's away, and I must go down the valley. I am sending some sheep away to market to-morrow morning."
"No, we want nothing at all," said Elsie, without paying much attention to what the woman was saying. Mrs. Tyson was obviously inclined to fuss, and would have to be suppressed. But she went out now without another word. There were two doors to the room at opposite ends, the inner one leading to a small hall, the kitchen and the staircase, the other, and outer door, opening directly close by the window on to a tiny garden with a flagged pathway. At the end of the path there was a gate, and a low garden wall. Beyond the gate a narrow lane and a brook separated the house from the fields and the great flank of fell.
The night was hot, and Endicott, unable to concentrate his attention upon his chosen theme, had the despairing sensation that he had lost grip of it altogether: his eyes wandered from his papers so continually to the hillside asleep in the bright moonlight. Here a great boulder threw a long motionless shadow down the slope, like a house; there a sharp rock-ridge cropping out of the hill, raised against the sky a line of black pinnacles like a file of soldiers.