"What does the impertinent old woman mean by calling me a sinner?" inquired Charley, addressing himself to his boots.
"You ben't?" said old Cicely, setting down the tea-tray. "Well! stand up and let us look at you, do! You are the first ever I see that wasn't no sinner!"
To which cutting observation Charley replied only by banging the door between himself and the unwelcome querist.
"Ay, it ben't for none of us to set ourselves up i' thatn's!" meditatively remarked old Cicely, in her turn to the teapot. "Mrs. Henrietta, there's a poor old man at the yard-door, my dear, and I can't tell where to look for Madam; maybe you'd see to him, poor soul?"
Henrietta, the eldest sister, answered by quitting the room. Cicely arranged the tea-cups—large shallow cups of delicate china—on a small round table in the window.
"The tea is ready, Mrs. Bell," she said; "will you please to pour it?"
The decorated young lady who sat at the tapestry-frame rose languidly, and began to pour out the tea, while Cicely set four chairs round the little table; having done which, the latter calmly took one of them herself, and producing a large colored handkerchief from her pocket, carefully spread it over her black woollen dress.
"Well, truly," said she, for she was in a talkative mood this evening, "there is no end to the good in a dish of tea. I am sorry I ever said what I have done against it, my dears, and I wish Madam would drink it. 'Tis so heartening like! It is a new-fangled sort of drink, there's no denying; but surely, I wonder how we ever got on without it!"
"Cicely," said Henrietta, coming in, "I have told Dolly to give the poor man some meat and dry straw in the shed for to-night."
"Very good, Mrs. Henrietta," answered Cicely; "I'll see as he gets it. Mrs. Bell, I'll be obliged to you of another dish of tea."