To be sure the long window aided the deception, and was fitted up solely with goods in the grocery line; but enter the dark low door-way, and get an odorous whiff from within, and one’s olfactory nerves would soon convince one of the contrary.
There was a flavor of everything there; a blended fragrance compounded of strong cheese, herrings, and candles, with a suspicion of matches and tarred wood, which to the uninitiated was singularly unpalatable, and suggested to them to shake off the dust of Mrs. Watkins as soon as possible.
To be sure this was only a trifle. To do her justice, Mrs. Watkins drove a very thriving trade; the very carters had a partiality for the shop, and would lurch in about twelve o’clock, with their pipes and hob-nailed boots, for a twist of tobacco or a slice of cheese, and crack clumsy jokes across the counter.
But, besides this, Mrs. Watkins had another source of profit that was at once lucrative and respectable. She let lodgings.
And very genteel lodgings they were, with a private entrance in Beulah Place, and a double door that excluded draughts and the heterogeneous odors from the shop.
These lodgers of Mrs. Watkins were the talk of the neighborhood, and many a passer-by looked curiously up at the bright windows and clean white curtains, between which in summer time bloomed the loveliest flowers, and the earliest snow-drops and crocuses in spring, in the hope of seeing two fair faces which had rather haunted their memory ever since they had first seen them.
It was six o’clock on the evening of a dreary November day. Watkins’s shop was empty, for the fog and the rawness and the cold had driven folks early to their homes; and Mrs. Watkins herself, fortified with strong tea and much buttered toast, was entering her profits on a small greasy slate, and casting furtive glances every now and then into the warm, snug parlor, where her nephew and factotum Tony was refreshing himself in his turn from the small black teapot on the hob.
A fresh, wholesome-looking woman was Mrs. Watkins, with an honest, reliable face and a twofold chin; but she had two peculiarities—she always wore the stiffest and cleanest and most crackling of print dresses, and her hair was nearly always pinned up in curl-papers under her black cap.
Mrs. Watkins was engaged in jotting down small dabs of figures on the slate and rubbing them out again, when the green baize swing-door leading to the passage was pushed back, and a tall grave-looking woman in black entered the shop and quietly approached the counter.
She was certainly a striking-looking person; in spite of the gray hair and a worn, sad expression, the face bore the trace of uncommon beauty, though all youth and freshness, animation and coloring, had faded out of it.