“No more ’aven’t I,” he said.
“Nor yet no mother?” he added in a low voice after a while.
“No,” she said.
He looked round the ghostly, deserted old home—at the figure huddled by the hearth where another had been wont to cook his meals, at the empty window where a familiar chair had once stood.
“No more ’aven’t I,” he said. And after a pause he added with a half laugh, “P’raps ye ’aven’t even got no work?”
“No,” she replied for the third time.
And he laughed outright as he added again: “No more ’aven’t I!”
He walked to the window, and she struggled to her feet.
“So I guess ye wanted to catch yer death,” he muttered.
She stood hanging over the blaze that was beginning to flicker down, and he with his back to her at the window gazing out into the garden, where the moonlight lay white and hard on the frosted walk and on the dreary, empty potato patch.