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Updated: June 13, 2025
The varnished walls, the neatly set chairs, the clock ticking so loudly above the mantel-shelf, all seemed somehow unnatural, with the unnaturalness of empty houses where steps go echoing echoing though nobody is there. She hastily put the kettle on the gas-ring, then prepared a glass for Miss Ethel's hot water and two cups for Mrs. Bradford's cocoa and her own.
She had not cried, as most children of eight would have done, but she had suffered in a kind of frozen silence, incapable of any outward expression of grief. "Unfeelin', I call it!" declared the woman who lived on the same floor as the Tennants, and who had attended at the doctor's behest, to a friend and neighbour who was occupied in boiling a kettle over a gas-ring.
"How could I have slept through all that din? Of course I heard. Why don't you tell me?" "I've hardly had time to glance at the paper myself," he said slowly. "You was reading it just now," she said severely, "for I heard the rustling. You begun reading it before you lit the gas-ring. Don't tell me! What was that they was shouting about the Edgware Road?"
The fog had lifted in the night, and for that Herrick was thankful; but the air was biting, and as he walked briskly along, Olga trotting alertly beside him, he owned to himself that a cup of hot coffee, followed by a sleep, would be welcome indeed. He let himself softly into the house and proceeded to make some coffee with the aid of the gas-ring.
Luckily we had a gas-ring, as it would have been an impossibility to run up and down the sixty-nine steps to the kitchen every time we wanted more hot water. At six the housekeeper had to prepare the evening meal for 7.30, and the Flemish cooks looked on with great amusement at my concoctions a lot of it was tinned stuff, so the cooking required was of the simplest.
Caroline went out of the room to make a cup of tea for Miss Ethel, and when she was lighting the gas-ring Wilson came in hurriedly, saying in a low voice: "I say, you won't mention anything about leaving them to-night, will you!" "What do you take me for?" whispered Caroline back. "A girl with her head screwed on the right way," he said.
The most awful dream would have been easier to bear than this awakening. She heard her husband go to the front door, and, as he bought the paper, exchange a few excited words with the newspaper-seller. Then he came back. There was a pause, and she heard him lighting the gas-ring in the sitting-room. Bunting always made his wife a cup of tea in the morning.
He lit the gas-ring and made the tea and brought it to her with cake and bread and butter on a little tray. He set it down beside her on the window-seat. But Anne could neither eat nor drink. She cried out to him. "Oh, Jerry, look at him. Do you think he's dying now?" He knelt down and looked. Nicky's eyes were two slits of glaze between half-shut lids.
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