“Land, it ain't that,” said she. “You wouldn't catch Ellen lookin' as if anything had come across her for such a thing as that.”
“No, I suppose she wouldn't,” said Andrew; and he actually blushed before his wife's eyes.
That afternoon Mrs. Wetherhed had been in, and told Fanny that she had heard that Robert Lloyd was to be married to Maud Hemingway; and both Andrew and Fanny had thought of that as the cause of Ellen's changed face.
“You'd better take that broom out into the shed, and get the snow off yourself, and come in and shut the door,” Fanny said, shortly. “You're colding the house all off, and Amabel has got a cold, and she's sitting right in the draught.”
“All right,” replied Andrew, meekly, though Fanny had herself been holding the sitting-room door open. In those days Andrew felt below his moral stature as head of the house. Actually, looking at Fanny, who was earning her small share towards the daily bread, she seemed to him much taller than he, though she was a head shorter. He thought so little of himself, he seemed to see himself as through the wrong end of a telescope. Fanny went into the sitting-room and shut the door with a bang. Amabel did not look up from her book. She was reading a library book much beyond her years, and sniffing pathetically with her cold. Amabel had begun to discover an omnivorous taste for books, which stuck at nothing. She understood not more than half of what she read, but seemed to relish it like indigestible food.
When Ellen came down-stairs, and sat beside the coal stove to change her shoes, she looked at the book which Amabel was reading. “You ought not to read that book, dear,” she said. “Let Ellen get you a better one for a little girl to-morrow.”
But Amabel, without paying the slightest heed to Ellen's words, looked up at her with amazement, as Andrew and Fanny had done. “What's the matter, Ellen?” she asked, in her little, hoarse voice.
Fanny and Andrew, who had just entered, stood waiting. Ellen bent over her shoe, drawing in the strings firmly and evenly.
“Mr. Lloyd has reduced the wage-list,” she said.
“How much?” asked Andrew, in a hoarse voice.