nearly six in the evening
I fear he is , '' Mr. Walker had said to his wife within ten minutes of the departure of the visitor . Mrs. Crawley would not allow herself to be driven up to the garden gate before her own house , but had left the carriage some three hundred yards off down the road , and from thence she walked home . It was now quite dark . It was nearly six in the evening on a wet December night , and although cloaks and shawls had been supplied to her , she was wet and cold when she reached her home . But at such a moment , anxious as she was to prevent the additional evil which would come to them all from illness to herself , she could not pass through to her room till she had spoken to her husband . He was sitting in the one sitting-room on the left side of the passage as the house was entered , and with him was their daughter Jane , a girl now nearly sixteen years of age . There was no light in the room , and hardly more than a spark of fire showed itself in the grate .