She went back to the bed, and limply leaned against the wall. She stared over at the box, with its peculiar wrought-iron hinges and handle.
"Has he been here long?" she asked, faintly, at last, of the blowzy woman who was looking at her with some concern, and at the same time, in view of the lady's respectability, trying to smooth down her untidy hair.
She thought a moment and judged he might have been there half a year.
Emmie wrung her hands in an aimless way. She felt little of pain as yet, or indignation; only vague throes and convulsions of change, a working of all the atoms in heart and brain trying to adjust themselves to something new.
"And he is poor!" she murmured.
"Well," said the landlady, exculpatingly, "we are all poor folks here, ma'am. He mostly pays his rent—I don't ask much, but when he's behind I'm not hard on him. He's a good lad," she went on, and as she was a sizable woman, after a gesture of deferential apology she took a seat, to support her in her view of lingering to angle with information until she caught a little enlightenment. "A good lad, but that proud! He thinks he'll be as rich as a dook some day, with his little fiddle!" She shook her head in compassion and chuckled fatly over a household joke of long standing. "He's all right in his head, ma'am, except on that point. A poor lad that plays in the streets is none so likely to pick up a fortune. And such tunes as he plays! I've always been told I'd an uncommon ear for a catch, but to catch head or tail of them is beyond me!"
"He plays in the streets!"
"Yes, poor Dook—come rain, come shine. Sometimes he has a good day, sometimes a bad one; but times is hard—it's not very good at best. He's not one of them pretty-impudent Italian boys with wheedling brown velvet eyes. He looks too scornful, and despises folks more than is for his own good. I have felt hurt at it myself, ma'am, and I may say I'm not touchy. When I've known that he was a bit hard up and he looked hollow, and I've asked him in neighborly to have a bite with us, he has answered me almost as if he hated me for it—and gone hollow."
His mother drew in her breath sharply.