"S'pose so, sometime," concurred the cap'n jovially. "It's the end o' mortals here below. Dunno but I shall be married myself, if it comes to that."
"When's he goin' to take his furniture away?" continued aunt Belinda, with the persistence of her kind.
"Don't know. Mebbe he ain't goin' to take it. Mebbe he's goin' to marry Letty. 'Pears to me I heard a kind of a rumor she was goin' to marry 'fore long."
Aunt Belinda shook her head at him.
"Don't talk so about a nice respectable woman," said she. "An' she goin' to move away from us an' live nobody knows where. It's a shame."
The cap'n burst into a laugh that aunt Belinda privately thought coarse, and turned back into the house, while she joined a group of matrons and went away home, discoursing volubly.
Cap'n Oliver stopped for a minute at the window in the empty parlor, watching their departing bulk, and then went into the hall, where the tread of many invading feet had left the moist autumn soil, with bits of grass and now and then a yellowed leaf.
"Letty!" he called roundly.
There was a light step above, and then Miss Letty's voice, a very little voice suited to the dusk and stillness, came down the stairs.
"Be they gone?" she faltered.