should come back.

In the back room a kettle bubbled on the stove, and Ann Eliza had laid a
cloth over one end of the centre table, and placed near the green-shaded
sewing lamp two tea-cups, two plates, a sugar-bowl and a piece of pie.
The rest of the room remained in a greenish shadow which discreetly
veiled the outline of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead surmounted by a
chromo of a young lady in a night-gown who clung with eloquently-rolling
eyes to a crag described in illuminated letters as the Rock of Ages;
and against the unshaded windows two rocking-chairs and a sewing-machine
were silhouetted on the dusk.

Ann Eliza, her small and habitually anxious face smoothed to unusual
serenity, and the streaks of pale hair on her veined temples shining
glossily beneath the lamp, had seated herself at the table, and was
tying up, with her usual fumbling deliberation, a knobby object wrapped
in paper. Now and then, as she struggled with the string, which was too
short, she fancied she heard the click of the shop-door, and paused
to listen for her sister; then, as no one came, she straightened her
spectacles and entered into renewed conflict with the parcel. In honour
of some event of obvious importance, she had put on her double-dyed and
triple-turned black silk. Age, while bestowing on this garment a patine
worthy of a Renaissance bronze, had deprived it of whatever curves the
wearer's pre-Raphaelite figure had once been able to impress on it;
but this stiffness of outline gave it an air of sacerdotal state which
seemed to emphasize the importance of the occasion.

Seen thus, in her sacramental black silk, a wisp of lace turned over
the collar and fastened by a mosaic brooch, and her face smoothed into
harmony with her apparel, Ann Eliza looked ten years younger than behind
the counter, in the heat and burden of the day. It would have been as
difficult to guess her approximate age as that of the black silk, for
she had the same worn and glossy aspect as her dress; but a faint tinge
of pink still lingered on her cheek-bones, like the reflection of sunset
which sometimes colours the west long after the day is over.

When she had tied the parcel to her satisfaction, and laid it with
furtive accuracy just opposite her sister's plate, she sat down, with an
air of obviously-assumed indifference, in one of the rocking-chairs near
the window; and a moment later the shop-door opened and Evelina entered.

The younger Bunner sist