“Thank you,” said Meg again; “thank you, Ben.”
She could not help watching him as his mother prepared the rather wretched mattress for Robin. Once he caught the look of her big, childish, gray eyes as it rested upon him with questioning sympathy, and he flushed up so that even by the light of the little smoky lamp she saw it. When the woman had finished she and the boy went away and left them, and they stood a moment looking at each other. They were both thinking of the same thing, but somehow they did not put it into words.
“We’ll wash off the dust first,” said Robin, “and then we’ll eat some of the things we have left from what the woman gave us. And then we’ll go to bed, and we shall drop just like logs.”
And this they did, and it was certainly a very short time before the smoky little lamp was out, and each had dropped like a log and lay stretched in the darkness, with a sense of actual ecstasy in limbs laid down to rest and muscles relaxed for sleeping.
“Robin,” said Meg, drowsily, through the dark that divided them, “everybody in the world has something to give to somebody else.”
“I’m thinking that, too,” Robin answered, just as sleepily; “nobody is so poor—that—he—hasn’t anything. That—boy——”
“He let us have his hard bed,” Meg murmured, “and he—hasn’t seen——”
But her voice died away, and Robin would not have heard her if she had said more. And they were both fast, fast asleep.
XIV
It would have been a loud sound which would have awakened them during those deep sleeping hours of the night. They did not even stir on their poor pillows when, long after midnight, there was the noise of heavy drunken footsteps and heavy drunken stumbling in the passage below, and then the raising of a man’s rough voice, and the upsetting of chairs and the slamming of doors, mingled with the expostulations of the woman, whose husband had come home in something worse than his frequent ill-fashion. They slept sweetly through it all, but when the morning came, and hours of unbroken rest had made their slumbers lighter, and the sunshine streamed in through the broken windows, they were called back to the world by loud and angry sounds.