"What I wanted was to borrow one of you girls to help me take down the old parlor curtains and put up my new ones," said Aunt Azraella. "Elvira has a bad knee, besides, she's busy, and I sent Aaron away on an errand. Oswyth, will you come?"
"I will go if you like, but Rob is better at such work," began Wythie.
"I have to help Patergrey," "I would rather have you," said Rob and her aunt, speaking together.
"Auntie and I are mutually agreeable to your going, Wythikins," said Rob, smiling gaily into her aunt's face.
"I'll go," said Wythie, rising hastily; she was always nervously afraid of what might happen when Rob and their aunt collided. "Do you want me now?"
"Certainly; it gets dark too early to lose a minute," said Mrs. Winslow. "Get your hat and jacket and come right along."
Oswyth obeyed. It was a pretty walk up the hill to Mrs. Winslow's from the little grey house, but Oswyth did not enjoy it, for her aunt seized the opportunity to question her as to the Greys' domestic affairs, "because," she said, "Mary was so shut-mouthed," and to point out to the young girl how straight they were headed for destruction. The girls did not visit more frequently than duty demanded the hill-house which would have been so pleasant to them if their uncle had not left it too early for them to have known him. Oswyth entered it now with the chill it invariably gave her.
Every chair sat prim and straight in its own place against the wall; it made one shudder to imagine what would have been the consequences if in the night they had taken to playing "Going to Jerusalem" with one another.
The light was carefully excluded, and, warm and soft although the air was out of doors, the house held a deadly chill in its atmosphere.
Books—proper compilations, selections, and poems—lay in austere firmness, each on its own spot on the bleak plateau of the marble-topped centre-table. A clock that had not made a new record of time in sixty-one thousand three hundred and twenty hours, pointed stoically to ten minutes to five from its position precisely in the middle of the parlor mantelpiece, flanked on either hand by a grimly resolute bronze warrior.