She changed her position, and spoke at random.
"This street is awfully stupid, isn't it?" she said. "Look at that man going up the steps!"
"Yes, he is very stupid, I daresay. What of it?"
"He is a clerk," she said; "and wheels his babies out on Sunday."
"Mamie!"
"Come and talk to Aunt Lydia again. How rude we are!"
"I want to talk to you," he demurred. "Aren't you going to ask me to stay to supper?"
The suggestion came from the widow almost at the same moment.
"I think we had better have the lamp," she went on. "The days are drawing in fast, Mr. Heriot, aren't they? We shall soon have winter again. Do you like the long evenings, or the long afternoons best? Just about now I always say that I can't bear to think of having to begin lighting up at five or six o'clock—it seems so unnatural; and then, next summer, somehow I feel quite lost, not being able to let down the blinds and light the lamp for tea. Mamie, dear, shut the window, and let down the blinds before I light the lamp—somebody might see in!" She suggested the danger in the same tone in which she might have apprehended a burglary.
Under a glass shade a laggard clock ticked drearily towards the crisis, and Heriot provoked its history by the eagerness with which he looked to see the time. It had been a wedding-present from "poor dear Edward's brother," and only one clockmaker had really understood it. The man had died, and since then——