Once a week, Wednesdays, Mr. Monteagle Almond, from the Bank, used to come in at nine o’clock and play chess with Uncle George. He told Lydia once that he had never missed a Wednesday evening, except when either or both were away, during the last fifteen years.
“And I don’t suppose,” solemnly said Mr. Almond, “I shall miss one for the next fifteen—not if we’re both spared.”
He was a dried-up-looking little man, with a thin beard and a nearly bald head, and both Uncle George and Aunt Beryl chaffed him facetiously from time to time on the subject of getting married, but Mr. Monteagle Almond never retaliated by turning the tables on them, as Lydia privately considered that he might well have done.
On the evenings when Mr. Almond was not present, Aunt Beryl very often took off her shoes and rested her feet, which were always causing her pain, against the rung of a chair. Sometimes, when Gertrude had cleared away, she hung over the dining-room table, spread with paper patterns and rolls of material, and after hovering undecidedly for a long while, would suddenly pounce on her largest pair of scissors and begin to slash away with every appearance of recklessness. But the recklessness was always justified when the dress or the blouse was finished. She was never too much absorbed to remember Lydia’s bedtime, however, and at nine o’clock every night Lydia was expected to rouse Grandpapa from the light slumber into which he would never admit that he had fallen, Uncle George from the newspaper or “Applied Mechanics,” and shake hands with them gravely as she said good night.
Only the game of chess might not be interrupted.
Aunt Beryl always came up to say good night to Lydia in her nice little room at the top of the house.
“Sure you’re quite warm enough, dear?”
“Yes, quite, thank you, auntie.”
“There’s another blanket whenever you want one. You’ve only to say. Have you said your prayers?”
“Yes.”