Her eyes were still on his face, and he could not meet them.
"You're a good lad, Ern," she said quietly.
The words, and the way of saying them, moved the lad more than all her rebuffs and brutalities in the past had done. His chest began to heave. She stood before him stiff as a blade of steel, as slight and straight.
For a second she laid her hand, fine still for all its toil, upon his arm.
"Go up to bed now," she said in the same very quiet way.
He went hurriedly.
There were few things which happened in that house of which Anne Caspar was not aware. That morning on rising she had missed her husband's watch on the dressing-table—and had said nothing. Later she had found the pawn-ticket in the tankard—and again had held her peace.
A wife before all things, yet to some extent a mother, she had known, had understood, had perhaps sympathized.