“I’m sure the spoons are all here, they were counted only this morning.”
Smith, for secret reasons of his own, did not press the question of silver, and a cry from the next room saved him from the necessity.
“That child shrieking like mad again—upon my word, Mrs. Smith, we must discharge the nurse. She is really incompus—that is, incomp——”
Fortunately for the grocer, who never could have fought his way through the word he was toiling at, Jerusha Maria renewed her shrieks with appalling vigor, and Mrs. Smith rushed into the next room.
James had been doing his best to appease the infant’s wrath, which had been kindled by his persistent refusal to let her run her hand into the round holes which Kate Gorman had left open in the stove, when she took the tea kettle off.
A dive into the red hot coals underneath had been ruthlessly frustrated; hence the shrieks of rage which had brought the mother into the midst of the fray. Goaded out of her usual good-temper before, she flamed up furiously now, snatching the young lady from the hold James was striving desperately to keep upon her. Mrs. Smith turned upon him.
“Do you want to kill the child before my eyes?” she demanded, pulling down Jerusha Maria’s frock with a jerk, “as if I hadn’t trouble enough without you setting in!” Before the lad could answer, or attempt to defend himself, Mrs. Smith sailed out of the room, smothering the child’s wrath by a fiercer embrace than she was conscious of.
“What is the matter?” cried Mrs. Carter, dropping her knife and fork, “poor little darling! who has been ’busing it?”
Mr. Smith was rather disturbed by the cloud on his wife’s face, and held out his arms in an abject, deprecating way; but the indignant woman turned her back upon him, and took her own chair, with majestic wrath.
“No, Mr. Smith, I’m not that helpless that I can’t take care of my own child.”