"Susey said you told her she might have the castors and tea things, and that I was to give them to her," said Mr. Pimble, without lifting his eyes from the hearth he was contemplating.
"Very well, I did tell Susey she might have the articles mentioned to amuse herself with, and it was fitting she should have them, or I had not given my consent. But why do I find them dashed to the floor and rendered useless? Answer me that, you slip-shod sloven?"
With an awful air, Mrs. Pimble folded her arms and looked down upon her husband, who cringed away before her ireful presence, and said, "Susey dropped the waiter."
"Dropped the waiter!" repeated Mrs. Pimble, her anger freshening to a gale. "And could you not prevent her from dropping it? or had you no more sense than to load an avalanche of china on the arms of a little child?"
"She took the waiter from me," said Pimble, in a dogged tone, his eyes still studying the tiles in the hearth.
Mrs. Pimble darted upon him one glance of the most withering contempt, and taking Susey by the hand led her from the room, without deigning to utter another word.
Soon as she disappeared Peggy set about clearing up the broken crockery, and Mr. Pimble crawled off into the recess of a window where the sun might shine on his shivering frame, and at length fell asleep. He had hardly concluded his first dream of fragmentary tea-cups, ere a violent pulling at his draggling coat-tails, which hung over the sill, caused him to wake with a start, when he beheld Peggy Nonce at his side, saying, "Dilly Danforth was come to see him." With a hopeless yawn he crawled out of his sunny nook, and, turning his dull, sleepy eyes toward the disturber of his quiet, demanded, in a surly tone, "what she wanted with him."
"I have come to pay my quarter's rent," said Mrs. Danforth, placing a bank note in his grimy hand. He closed his skinny fingers on it with an eager clutch, and looked in the woman's face with a vague expression of wonder.
"I am glad to get a shilling from you at last," said he, fondling the note; "but this will not quite pay up the last quarter's rent. There's about half a dollar more my due. You can come and do the spring cleaning, and then I'll call matters square between us."
"I thought ten dollars was the sum specified, for three months' rent," remarked Mrs. Danforth.