“And how are the children, Mrs. Barclay?” asked Mrs. Hogan.
“They are both well, thank God.”
“And do you never hear anything of their father?”
Mrs. Barclay’s face clouded.
“Yes,” she answered, “he came home a few days since, but only stayed one day.”
“Didn’t he bring you any money then?”
“No; he borrowed some from me.”
“It’s a shame, so it is, in a great, strapping man like him to leave you to work for the poor children.”
Mrs. Hogan had never seen Mr. Barclay, or she would have recognized him in the man whom she helped drive away from his father’s room, and was utterly ignorant of the relationship between him and the old man whom she was nursing.