ten o'clock
Be sure you say it to-night . And now you may go , Prue . '' Prue went accordingly , and Miss Tranter , resuming her knitting , returned to the bar , and took up her watchful position opposite the clock , there to remain patiently till closing time . The minutes wore on , and though some of the company at the `` Trusty Man '' went away in due course , others came in to replace them , so that even when it was nearing ten o'clock the common room was still fairly full . Matt Peke was evidently hail-fellow-well-met with many of the loafers of the district , and his desultory talk , with its quaint leaning towards a kind of rustic philosophy intermingled with an assumption of profound scientific wisdom , appeared to exercise considerable fascination over those who had the patience and inclination to listen to it . Helmsley accepted a pipe of tobacco offered to him by the surly-looking Dubble and smoked peacefully , leaning back in his chair and half closing his eyes with a drowsy air , though in truth his senses had never been more alert , or his interest more keenly awakened . He gathered from the general conversation that Bill Bush was an accustomed night lodger at the `` Trusty Man , '' that Dubble had a cottage not far distant , with a scolding wife and an uppish daughter , and that it was because she knew of his home discomforts that Miss Tranter allowed him to pass many of his evenings at her inn , smoking and sipping a mild ale , which without fuddling his brains , assisted him in part to forget for a time his domestic worries .