“Are you tired, my dear?” asked Mr. Kayll after a while, as he felt that she lagged slightly behind him.
“Rather,” she answered, quickening her steps for a few minutes, but gradually falling back into her old weary walk, dragging her unwilling feet along, with her shoes, much too large, flapping the pavement at every step. “I have been out all day, and it’s getting so late.”
And as she grew more tired she ceased to chatter. On and on they went along the broad road crowded with foot-passengers, past the shops that were still open and brilliant with flaring gas-jets. Once more only before they reached their destination Amy spoke:
“Isn’t it funny,” she said, looking up at her companion, “to see all these shops and the heaps of people, and to hear them shouting and laughing, and then just to lift up your eyes and there are the stars?”
“Very,” said Mr. Kayll without thinking about it, for he had other matters on his mind; and if he had thought about it, it would have seemed to him the most natural thing that the stars should be overhead all the time.
Amy was silent. It was her private belief that everything was very strange—the world, the people in it, and the sky above; but no one she knew seemed to look upon it in quite the same light.
On and on, then suddenly to the right, and down a darker street for some distance, then to the left, up a narrower turning, and Amy stopped and said:
“This is Wingate Row, and here is our house.”
And a few minutes later Mr. Kayll was in a poorly-furnished room talking to a thin haggard-looking young widow, who was sitting beside a bed on which lay the sick baby with a face as white as the pillow. In the mixed pleasure and sadness of meeting his cousin again after so long an interval, and in such a way, he had no eyes to spare for anything else, and did not see the loving way in which little old-fashioned Amy bent over the invalid, softly kissing her, and whispering, “How are you, baby dear?”
She kneeled by the bed, holding the tiny white fingers, and doubling them up or opening them out, half playfully, half in forgetfulness of what she was doing, as she talked in a low voice meant only for baby’s ears.