This is by no means an uncommon complaint with husbands.
She gave him back his jokes transformed into repartees, and thrust her wrist through the loop of his arm.
They walked along the bare white road for about a mile and a half. As they proceeded along Ashbrook said—
“I tell’ee what it is, Patty—it’s my belief that Charles Peace ’as had a hand in this business. People say he’s the most desperate and determined burglar out.”
“Oh, Richard, dear, be just,” returned his wife. “It don’t seem fair to accuse a man without the faintest scrap of evidence against him.”
“Well, I dunno as it is, but it’s just like one of his tricks.”
“But he has not been seen in the neighbourhod for years.”
They presently turned aside through a gate which opened on a footpath which led to Mother Bagley’s cottage.
This humble habitation stood in a field, with no safeguards from solitude but a walnut tree, hollowed by lightning, a pair of apple trees, a microscopic garden of cabbages and potatoes, and a high untrimmed hedge, in which bloomed, side by side, the last convolvoluses of summer and the first berries of approaching winter.
The cottage was small and compact. It did not ramble over a fraction of an acre as most cottages do, and its appearance made one believe that it was not the home of a common peasant.