“Oh! Miss,” he exclaimed with polite anxiety, “I beg your pardon. The sleet drivin’ in my face prevented my seeing you. You’re not hurt I hope.”
“No, Mr Flint, you haven’t hurt me,” said May, laughing, as she recognised the voice of her own landlord.
“Why, it’s you, Miss May! Now isn’t that good luck, my turnin’ up just in the nick o’ time to see you home? Here, catch hold of my arm. The wind’s fit to tear the lamp-posts up by the roots.”
“But this is not the way home,” objected the girl.
“That’s true, Miss May, it ain’t, but I’m only goin’ round a bit by St. Paul’s Churchyard. There’s a shop there where they sell the sausages my old ’ooman’s so fond of. It don’t add more than a few yards to the road home.”
The old ’ooman to whom Solomon Flint referred was his grandmother. Flint himself had spent the greater part of his life in the service of the Post-Office, and was now a widower, well stricken in years. His grandmother was one of those almost indestructible specimens of humanity who live on until the visage becomes deeply corrugated, contemporaries have become extinct, and age has become a matter of uncertainty. Flint had always been a good grandson, but when his wife died the love he had borne to her seemed to have been transferred with additional vehemence to the “old ’ooman.”
“There’s a present for you, old ’ooman,” said Flint, placing the paper of sausages on the table on entering his humble abode, and proceeding to divest himself of his waterproof cape; “just let me catch hold of a fryin’-pan and I’ll give you to understand what a blow-out means.”
“You’re a good laddie, Sol,” said the old woman, rousing herself and speaking in a voice that sounded as if it had begun its career far back in the previous century.
Mrs Flint was Scotch, and, although she had lived from early womanhood in London, had retained something of the tone and much of the pronunciation of the land o’ cakes.
“Ye’ll be wat, lassie,” she said to May, who was putting off her bonnet and shawl in a corner. “No, Grannie,” returned the girl, using a term which the old woman had begged her to adopt, “I’m not wet, only a little damp.”