“All right! I’m coming,” said Edwin superiorly.
“I know what you want,” Clara said teasingly as she turned towards the passage.
“What do I want?”
“You want the empty attic all to yourself, and a fine state it would be in in a month, my word!”
“How do you know I want the empty attic?” Edwin repelled the onslaught; but he was considerably taken aback. It was a mystery to him how those girls, and Clara in particular, got wind of his ideas before he had even formulated them definitely to himself. It was also a mystery to him how they could be so tremendously interested in matters which did not concern them.
“You never mind!” Clara gibed, with a smile that was malicious, but charmingly malicious. “I know!”
She had merely seen him staring into the empty attic, and from that brief spectacle she had by divination constructed all his plans.
Four.
The Clayhanger sitting-room, which served as both dining-room and drawing-room, according to the more primitive practices of those days, was over one half of the shop, and looked on Duck Square. Owing to its northern aspect it scarcely ever saw the sun. The furniture followed the universal fashion of horse-hair, mahogany, and wool embroidery. There was a piano, with a high back-fretted wood over silk pleated in rays from the centre; a bookcase whose lower part was a cupboard; a sofa; and a large leather easy-chair which did not match the rest of the room. This easy-chair had its back to the window and its front legs a little towards the fireplace, so that Mr Clayhanger could read his newspaper with facility in daytime. At night the light fell a little awkwardly from the central chandelier, and Mr Clayhanger, if he happened to be reading, would continually shift his chair an inch or two to left or right, backwards or forwards, and would also continually glance up at the chandelier, as if accusing it of not doing its best. A common sight in the sitting-room was Mr Clayhanger balanced on a chair, the table having been pushed away, screwing the newest burner into the chandelier. When he was seated in his easy-chair the piano could not be played, because there was not sufficient space for the stool between the piano and his chair; nor could the fire be made up without disturbing him, because the japanned coal-box was on the same side of the hearth-rug as the chair. Thus, when the fire languished and Mr Clayhanger neglected it, the children had either to ask permission to step over his legs, or suggest that he should attend to the fire himself. Occasionally, when he was in one of his gay moods, he would humorously impede the efforts of the fire-maker with his feet, and if the fire-maker was Clara or Edwin, the child would tickle him, which brought him to his senses and forced him to shout: “None o’ that! None o’ that!”