"We will not speak of what is past, and cannot be recalled," said Mr. Ekworth. "Your husband appears to be very ill, Mrs. Hallet," he added; it seemed the best way of opening a conversation with the unhappy pair.
"Yes, he was very ill," said the poor woman, "and had been failing in health a long time." He had never, since they came to live in London, been the man he was before; and now he was fit for nothing. It was a bad thing for them that they ever came to London, she added.
The man again interrupted his wife, by asking, in a querulous tone, "what occasion there was to talk about that?" He came to London, he said, to better his circumstances; and if things had not turned out as he expected, he did not want to be told of it.
Mr. Ekworth once more soothed the evidently perturbed feelings of the irritable invalid, and led the poor wife to speak of their present circumstances and means of support.
They were very poorly off, she replied to his inquiries, and often had not enough to eat. They should long since have been starved, she added, only that she was able to go out to work, and had got into regular employment in some few families as a charwoman.
"You had two sons and a daughter before you came to London. Are they not living; and is it not in their power to help you?" asked the visitor.
The poor woman shook her head despondingly. Their children were all living, she said; but, she did not know how it was, the boys, as they grew up to be men, got into bad ways, and were often worse off than themselves. The girl had married respectably, but she seldom came near her parents. The poor woman spoke this with evident reluctance.
"She is an unnatural child," said Hallet, impatiently; "and I hope she may find out some day what it is to have one of the same sort herself."
"Don't, John, don't!" remonstrated the wife in a low voice. "You know there is a reason why she does not come here."
Mr. Ekworth hastened to change the subject. He did not wish to learn more of the family history of his old workman.