"There, there! Why, in those days I hadn't so much as—I didn't so much as know you were on earth."
"We can't ever forget our first loves," said Pearl. "It's no use your standing up there and letting on. I know what I know. Put out the light and get into bed. Your feet are getting cold standing there that way."
Her mouth turned into the pillow, she went on: "I remember just as well as if it was yesterday when her father lay dying—you know how much he thought of that horse of his, and how it always had red tassels hung on its ears the first day of spring, and the brass on the harness was enough to put your eyes out, he worked over it so. He thought the world of that horse, and when he see he was going to go, he got up and said, 'Hat, shoot the horse. I won't be quiet in my grave for thinking what kind of treatment it may be getting.' And what does she do but out into the barn and shoot the gun into the air, and come back and let on like the horse is gone. And her poor father lying there at his last gasp."
"Still and all," said Elmer, "wouldn't it have been kind of too bad to put a young horse like that out of its misery? It warn't a day over ten years old."
"And now what?" continued Pearl. "I heard only to-day that she's been to the first selectman about having our place here condemned on the ground that it's unsafe. And the next thing I know I'll be turned out of house and home and won't know which way to turn nor where to lay my head. After I've slaved like a dog all my life and worse—and what thanks do I get for it? Why, my husband—walks away—and leaves me—in the lurch. That's how much he—thinks of me. Ain't you never coming to bed?"
Elmer, who had stood listening, now in fact had his lips ready puffed to blow out the light.
But he did not blow.
Instead he said, "My soul and body, what was that?"
A fearful sound smote upon their ears. Something had shouldered the house. The stovepipe in the kitchen fell down, there followed the sound as of some scaly creature dragging its body across the linoleum. Then there came a fall of plaster, and the kitchen stove itself appeared stealthily through the bedroom wall.
"My conscience!" said Elmer Higgins at the height of his mystification.