"I'll tell him with pleasure. You go to bed, and I'll wait here to tell him when he comes in."
"Supposing he's very late?"
"He won't be later than the last Tube train. I shall get home comfortably, my love; don't you worry about me. We old women can take care of ourselves, you know. It's ten o'clock, and you go off to bed."
"I don't know that I want to, mother."
"Shoo!" said Mrs. Amber.
When Marie was in bed, her mother went to the dining-room, established herself in an armchair, and put a match to the fire. Her husband being long dead, she regarded her own sacrificial days as over, and she remained tolerably comfortable on what he had left behind him. In the days of his life, the money had taken him away to those vague haunts of men; but now it solaced, every penny of it, his widow. As she sat by the kindled fire, Mrs. Amber resumed her knitting, and as she knitted she wondered fondly what the new baby would be like; whether it would be boy or girl, and just exactly what piece of work she had better get in hand against its arrival.
So Osborn Kerr, arriving home not very late—it was only just after eleven o'clock—found his mother-in-law seated alone upon his hearth, needles flying over one of the pale blue jerseys in which little George was to winter.
She greeted his stare of astonishment placidly, with her propitiating smile and deceitful words:
"I thought you would be cold, Osborn, so I put a match to the fire."
"Oh, thanks," said Osborn, "thanks very much. Where's Marie?"