about nine o'clock
This chance passage of conversation between old Maisie and the housekeeper ran near to sounding the one note needed to force the truth of an incredible tale on the blank unsuspicion of its actors . A many other little things may have gone as near . If so , none left any one of its audience , or witnesses , more absolutely in the dark about it than the solitary old woman who that evening watched that log , stimulated by the scrapwood during her very perfunctory supper ; first till it became a roaring flame that laughed at those two candles , then till the flame died down and left it all aglow ; then till the fire reached its heart and broke it , and it fell , and flickered up again and died , and slowly resolved itself into a hillock of red ember and creeping incandescence , a treasury still of memories of the woodlands and the coming of the spring , and the growth of the leaves that perished . At about nine o'clock , Lupin , acting officially , came to offer her services to see the old lady to bed . No ! -- if she might do so she would rather sit up till her ladyship came in . She could shift for herself ; in fact , like most old people who have never been waited on , she greatly preferred it .