They sat up in his wife’s room after tea, for Carrie left her bed only for an hour or two at noon. She dozed against her pillows, a brown shawl covering her shoulders, while the two children played by the hearth. Pettigrove sat silent, gazing in the fire.
“What a racket you are making, Polly and Jane!” quavered Carrie.
The little girls thereupon ceased their sporting and took a picture book to the hearthrug where they examined it in awed silence by the firelight. After some minutes the invalid called out: “Don’t make such a noise turning over all them leaves.”
Polly made a grimace and little Jane said: “We are looking at the pictures.”
“Well,” snapped Mrs. Pettigrove, “why can’t you keep to the one page!”
John sat by the fire vowing to himself that he would not go along to the widow, and in the very act of vowing he got up and began putting on his coat.
“Are you going out, John?”
“There’s a window catch to put right along at Mrs. Cronshaw’s,” he said. At other times it had been a pump to mend, a door latch to adjust, or a jamb to ease.
“I never knew things to go like it before—I can’t understand it,” his wife commented. “What with windows and doors and pumps and bannisters anyone would think the house had got the rot. It’s done for the purpose, or my name’s not what it is.”
“It won’t take long,” he said as he went.