“Is it Mrs. Bond?” asked Thomas Godolphin, as he caught a glimpse of her features.
“Didn’t you know me, sir? I know’d you by the voice as soon as you spoke. You have got trouble too, I hear. The world’s full of nothing else. Why does it come?”
“Get up,” said Thomas Godolphin. “Why do you sit there? Why are you here at all at this hour of the night?”
“It’s where I’m going to stop till morning,” returned the woman, sullenly. “There shall be no getting up for me.”
“What is the matter with you?” he resumed.
“Trouble,” she shortly answered. “I’ve been toiling up to the work’us, asking for a loaf, or a bit o’ money: anything they’d give to me, just to keep body and soul together for my children. They turned me back again. They’ll give me nothing. I may go into the union with the children if I will, but not a stiver of help’ll they afford me out of it. Me, with a corpse in the house, and a bare cubbort.”
“A corpse!” involuntarily repeated Thomas Godolphin. “Who is dead!”
“John.”
Curtly as the word was spoken, the tone yet betrayed its own pain. This John, the eldest son of the Bonds, had been attacked with the fever at the same time as the father and brother. They had succumbed to it: this one had recovered: or, at least, had appeared to be recovering.
“I thought John was getting better,” observed Thomas Godolphin.