It did not surprise me much that when I reached Well Walk again, Miss Levey was there. That echoing, half-furnished house of ours, I ought to say, was on the south side of the Walk, and my own study was on the ground floor at the back, with Evie's drawing-room immediately overhead. I heard this drawing-room door open as I entered, and it was on the bare half-landing, against the red and blue window, with cut-glass stars round its border, that I saw Miss Levey's flamingo-coloured costume with the black satin buttons.
"Oh, here he is," Evie was saying; "he'll take you on to your bus. Good-bye, Miriam, dear—remember me to Aschael——"
"Good-bye, darling—don't forget, will you?"
"Good-bye."
I remember that it was as I took Miss Levey to her bus that afternoon that she asked me to call her by her Christian name. Instantly I did so—and forgot her request again with a promptitude even greater. To tell the truth, that "Remember me to Aschael" of Evie's stuck a little in my throat. A little more ceremony, it seemed to me, would have fitted the relation better, and I differed from Miss Levey if she thought that in asking me to call her "Miriam," she, and not I, was conferring the favour. Therefore as I saw her off I again addressed her as "Miss Levey" and let her take it as an inadvertence or not as she list. Then, with that "Remember me to Aschael" again uppermost in my mind, I returned to Evie.
In hoping to see her alone, however, I was again disappointed. This time Aunt Angela was there. She was standing by the new dining-table, and apparently deploring my purchase.
"What a pity!" she was saying. "Just when I'd arranged for you to have that one of mine! I meant it as a surprise—oh, why didn't I tell you sooner!"
I have referred, I hope not unkindly, to a certain laxity in this dear and harmless spinster's hold on life. Since the birth of our child this laxity had become intensified, if such a word can be used of laxity, and very rarely had she come up to see us empty-handed. From some mysterious hoard of belongings that seemed ever on the point of exhaustion and yet ever stood the strain of another gift, she had brought, now a tiny pair of knitted woollen socks, now a shawl, now a bit of silver, and even the mite's cradle was that in which Evie herself had been rocked. She found a pleasure quite paradisal in these continual givings. I think they were her spiritual boasts of how little she required for herself.
"What a pity!" she purred again. "But I dare say they'd take it back——"