He watched her in silence.
“It’s horrible,” he broke out. “You’re a strange woman, and there you sit, pouring tea out as if—— Who are you? I don’t know you.”
“Don’t you?” she said quietly. And then he remembered all the old talks with the old wife.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I don’t want to be a brute.”
“It’s no use my saying I’m sorry,” she said.
“Are you?” He leaned forward to put the question.
“We must make the best of it,” she said. “Perhaps—— Look here, don’t let’s speak of it till after Christmas; let’s just go on as we did before.”
So the days wore on. But the situation when Michael lived in torment in the company of his old wife was simplicity itself compared to his new life with a wife—young, beautiful, and a stranger, yet in all essentials his dearest friend. This discomfort grew daily—hourly branching out into ever fresh embarrassments—new and harassing, vexatious, half understood, wholly resented.
The wife had her burden to bear also. The laundress had only known the old wife as “Mrs Wood.”
“She thought I was your mother,” the wife said when Michael propounded the difficulty. But the laundress’s attitude to the new Mrs Wood had a sting that was almost punishment enough to the wife, had Michael only known, for all that she had done amiss.