seven o'clock
`` Them late dinners '' were the object of her perpetual railings ; `` oh , how much more comfortable it was , if gentry would but think so , to have your dinner at two , and get done with your washing up before you was cleaned , or had any occasion to bother yourself about your cap ! '' When little Amy cried over the loneliness of `` the children 's tea , '' which they frequently had to pour out for themselves , Betty gave her a cake and a kiss , and felt disposed to cry too . `` And she do n't know , poor child , not the half , '' said Betty , which was a kind of oracular sentence difficult for Betty herself to understand . The children had nothing to do with the late dinner ; they were sent to bed earlier than they used to be , and scolded if any distant sounds of romps made itself audible at seven o'clock when their elders were dining ; and then when the little ones went injured to bed , and Johnnie , indignant , worked at his lessons by himself in a corner of the old nursery , deeply aware that his school-boy boots and jacket were quite unfit for the drawing-room , the grown-up young people ran lightly upstairs , all smiles and pleasure , and those delightful evenings began . The children sometimes could not get to sleep for the piano and the raspings of the fiddle , which sounds of mirth suggested nothing but the wildest enjoyment to them ; and when the door opened now and then , bursts of laughter and mingling voices would come out like the sounds the Peri heard at the gates of Paradise . The elder ones were happy ; their little atoms of individual life had all united for the moment into one sunshiny and broad foundation , on which everything seemed to rest with that strange sense of stability and continuance , which such a moment of happiness , though it carries every element of change in it , almost invariably brings . It felt as if it might go on for ever , and yet the very sentiment that inspired it made separation and convulsion inevitable -- one of those strange paradoxes which occur every day .