The wife saw the storm brewing, and she knew how put out I was, for I had not lit my pipe, nor yet had my evening nap, which I always have after tea. So she did what she knew so well how to do—filled my pipe, forced it into my hand, and just as I was going to dash it to pieces in the ashes, she gave me one of her old looks, kissed me on the forehead, as with one hand she pressed me back into my chair, and then with the other she lit a splint and held it to my tobacco.
I was done. She always gets over me like that; and after smoking in silence for half-an-hour, I was lying back, with my eyes closed, dropping off to sleep, when my wife said—what had gone before I hadn’t heard—
“Yes, he’s asleep now.”
That woke me up of course, and if I didn’t lie there shamming and heard all they said in a whisper!
“How came you to make him more vexed than he was, Luke?” says the wife; and he told her.
“I couldn’t do it, mother,” he said, excitedly. “It was heart-breaking. She’s living in a wretched room there with her daughter; and, mother, when I saw her I felt as if—there, I can’t tell you.”
“Go on, Luke,” she said.
“They’re half-starved,” he said in a husky way. “Oh, mother! it’s horrible. Such a sweet, beautiful girl, and the poor woman herself dying almost with some terrible disease.”
The wife sighed.
“They told me,” he went on, “how hard they had tried to live by ordinary needlework, and failed, and that as a last resource they had tried to get the machine.”