"What's that?" His hand was on her hand. "See here, you, ain't I kind to 'em?"
His touch sobered her quite suddenly.
"Kind to 'em—?"
She repeated his words vaguely as though not fully conscious of their actual meaning.
The grip of his fingers tightened cruelly about her arm.
"Ain't I—kind—to—'em?"
"Oh, my Gawd," she whimpered. "Oh, my Gawd,—yes."
He went back to the center of the room and lighted the lamp on the bare-boarded, pine-wood table. Its light flickered in a sickly, yellow glow over the straight-backed chairs, across the unpapered walls, and dribbled feebly upwards to where the heavy rafters of the ceiling were obliterated in a smothering thickness of shadows.
"What're you standing there for? Pull down that blind! Come here, I say!"
The faint, motionless form there beside the dog-house. The wooden, stiffened attitude of it. The great mass of the chow's rigid body that was gradually becoming absorbed into the gray shadow; that was slowly losing its faint outline in the saturating, blurring darkness.