A House of Gentlefolk

A bright spring day was fading into evening. High overhead in the clear heavens small rosy clouds seemed hardly to move across the sky but to be sinking into its depths of blue. In a handsome house in one of the outlying streets of the government town of O-- (it was in the year 1842) two women were sitting at an open window; one was about fifty, the other an old lady of seventy.