At the house the blinds were drawn up, and the women sedately cheerful. Maggie was actually teasing Bert about his new hat, and young Clara, active among the preparations for tea for six, was intensely and seriously proud at being included in the ceremonial party of adults. She did not suspect that the adults themselves had a novel sensation of being genuinely adult, and that the last representative of the older generation was gone, and that this common sensation drew them together rather wistfully.
"Oh! By the way, there's a telegram for you," said Maggie, as Minnie left the dining-room after serving the last trayful of hot dishes and pots.
Edwin took the telegram. It was from Hilda, to say that she and George would return on the morrow.
"But what about the house being cleaned, and what about servants?" cried Edwin, affecting, in order to conceal his pleasure, an annoyance which he did not in the least feel.
"Oh! Mrs. Tams has been looking after the house--I shall go round and see her after tea. I've got one servant for Hilda."
"You never told me anything about it," said Edwin, who was struck, by no means for the first time, by the concealment which all the women practised.
"Didn't I?" Maggie innocently murmured. "And then Minnie can go and help if necessary until you're all settled again. Hadn't we better have the gas lighted before we begin?"
And in the warm cosiness of the small, ugly, dining-room shortly to be profaned by auctioneers and furniture-removers, amid the odours of tea and hot tea-cakes, and surrounded by the family faces intimate, beloved, and disdained, Edwin had an exciting vision of the new life with Hilda, and the vision was shot through with sharp flitting thoughts of the once gorgeous Auntie Hamps forlorn in the cemetery and already passing into oblivion.
After tea, immediately the children had been sent home, he said, self-consciously to Albert:
"I've got something for you."