ten o'clock at night
This went on for many weeks and perhaps it might have gone on until my time was full but for something which , occurring under my eyes , made me tremble with the fear that the life I was living and the hope I was cherishing were really very wrong and selfish . Of my landlady , Mrs. Williams , I saw little . She was a rather hard but no doubt heavily-laden woman , who had to `` do '' for a swarm of children , besides two young men lodgers who lived in the kitchen and slept in the room behind mine . Her husband was a quiet man -LRB- a carter at the dairy -RRB- whom I never saw at all except on the staircase at ten o'clock at night , when , after winding the tall clock on the landing , he went upstairs to bed in his stocking feet . But the outstanding member of the family for me was a shock-headed girl of fourteen called Emmerjane , which was a running version of Emma Jane . I understood that Emmerjane was the illegitimate daughter of Mrs. Williams 's dead sister , and that she had been born in Carnarvon , which still shimmered in her memory in purple and gold . Emmerjane was the drudge of the family , and I first saw her in the street at dusk , mothering a brood of her little cousins , taking Hughie by one hand and Katie by the other and telling Gwennie to lay hold of Davie lest he should be run over by the milk vans .