The flag had been struck, and the gun had been fired, at the right moment of time, and I felt as snugly cut off from the rest of Walworth as if the moat were thirty feet wide by as many deep.  Nothing disturbed the tranquillity of the Castle, but the occasional tumbling open of John and Miss Skiffins:  which little doors were a prey to some spasmodic infirmity that made me sympathetically uncomfortable until I got used to it.  I inferred from the methodical nature of Miss Skiffins’s arrangements that she made tea there every Sunday night; and I rather suspected that a classic brooch she wore, representing the profile of an undesirable female with a very straight nose and a very new moon, was a piece of portable property that had been given her by Wemmick.

We ate the whole of the toast, and drank tea in proportion, and it was delightful to see how warm and greasy we all got after it.  The Aged especially, might have passed for some clean old chief of a savage tribe, just oiled.  After a short pause for repose, Miss Skiffins — in the absence of the little servant who, it seemed, retired to the bosom of her family on Sunday afternoons — washed up the tea-things, in a trifling lady-like amateur manner that compromised none of us.  Then, she put on her gloves again, and we drew round the fire, and Wemmick said, “Now Aged Parent, tip us the paper.”

Wemmick explained to me while the Aged got his spectacles out, that this was according to custom, and that it gave the old gentleman infinite satisfaction to read the news aloud.  “I won’t offer an apology,” said Wemmick, “for he isn’t capable of many pleasures — are you, Aged P.?”

“All right, John, all right,” returned the old man, seeing himself spoken to.

“Only tip him a nod every now and then when he looks off his paper,” said Wemmick, “and he’ll be as happy as a king.  We are all attention, Aged One.”

“All right, John, all right!” returned the cheerful old man:  so busy and so pleased, that it really was quite charming.

The Aged’s reading reminded me of the classes at Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s, with the pleasanter peculiarity that it seemed to come through a keyhole.  As he wanted the candles close to him, and as he was always on the verge of putting either his head or the newspaper into them, he required as much watching as a powder-mill.  But Wemmick was equally untiring and gentle in his vigilance, and the Aged read on, quite unconscious of his many rescues.  Whenever he looked at us, we all expressed the greatest interest and amazement, and nodded until he resumed again.

As Wemmick and Miss Skiffins sat side by side, and as I sat in a shadowy corner, I observed a slow and gradual elongation of Mr. Wemmick’s mouth, powerfully suggestive of his slowly and gradually stealing his arm round Miss Skiffins’s waist.  In course of time I saw his hand appear on the other side of Miss Skiffins; but at that moment Miss Skiffins neatly stopped him with the green glove, unwound his arm again as if it were an article of dress, and with the greatest deliberation laid it on the table before her.  Miss Skiffins’s composure while she did this was one of the most remarkable sights I have ever seen, and if I could have thought the act consistent with abstraction of mind, I should have deemed that Miss Skiffins performed it mechanically.