“Aye,” the mother answered, cold as death, her eyes on the quick flames.
“But how will we know where he is, then?” the lad wailed.
“I know as well as ever. Do you think I can forget?” the woman said.
So she emptied her heart clean.
But how can any heart live empty? On a day soon after this she went into the city to change again her bit of paper, for these days she did not trouble her cousin often, having learned to be alone, and when she had the ten pieces in her hand she turned to go and there a man stood by the door upon the street, and he stood smiling and smoothing his upper lip, and it was the landlord’s agent.
Not since the late autumn had he seen her close as this, and there was none near who knew them and so he stared at her boldly and smiling and he said, “What do you here, goodwife?”
“I did but change a bit of money—” she broke off here, for she had been about to say on, “that my man sent me,” but the words stuck in her throat somehow and she did not utter them.
“And what then?” he asked her, his lids lifted and his eyes pressing her.
She drooped her head and strove to speak as commonly she did, and she said, “I thought to go and buy a silver pin, or one washed with silver, to hold my hair. The one I had grew thin from long use and broke yesterday.”