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She wore a blue-checked calico apron that came to her throat, but the apron was clean, and her firm though furrowed face gave evidences of recent housewifely exertions. Her eyes had the strange look of the cheerfulness that is intimately acquainted with sorrow. She did not seem surprised at seeing me. "I have come to ask about Mr. Krebs," I told her.
Presently he came down dressed, and with a big bundle in a blue-checked, enormous handkerchief. "And now," he said, "you'll see me again when you do." "It'll be before I want to," she replied; and at that he marched out of the house with his bundle. She sat trembling slightly, but her heart brimming with contempt.
Doherty was washing her couple of blue-checked aprons in an old brown butter-crock, and Mick thought he had introduced the subject rather happily when he told her "she had a right to be takin' her hands out of the suds, and dippin' the finest curtsey she could conthrive, and she wid the Commander-in-Gineral of the Army Forces steppin' in to pay her a visit."
These windows were glazed with small squares of glass so green that, but for his good eyes, the young man could not have seen the blue-checked cotton curtains which screened the mysteries of the room from profane eyes.
And there, close to the edge of the road, as if she had stepped aside to let him pass, was the figure of a little, bent old woman nay, in the brightening dawn, a bush a blackberry bush, clad in a blue-checked apron, a red plaid shawl, and with a neat sunbonnet nodding on its topmost spray. His first emotion was intense relief. Then he stood staring at the bush in rising indignation.
Money he had none; and, beyond the dirty fearnought blue seaman's jacket which he wore, a pair of trowsers of the coarse cloth of the country, an old black vest that had seen better days, and two blue-checked shirts, clothes he had none. He shaved but once a week, never combed his hair, and never washed himself.
Uncle Timothy, as was to be expected, as soon as he heard of the emergency, joined Bob in coming to Sally's aid, and at half past seven in the evening might have been discovered by the curious, sitting in the small kitchen, a blue-checked apron tied about his neck, busily polishing silver. "It seemed to me pretty bright before, Sally," was his only comment as he worked.
He ascribed his momentary pause to fatigue, and as a matter of fact, the perspiration was dripping from his forehead without his thinking of wiping it with his great blue-checked handkerchief; but fatigue had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile the dead form showed through the fine, gauze-like stuff, and some gold work shone faintly through it as well.
Eily's heart leapt, and then was still; there were her two bare feet peeping from beneath her thick red petticoat, just as they used in the olden times, and there was the blue-checked apron she had long ago discarded. With face now white, now red, she gazed at the picture, then spelt out its title, "The Queen of Connemara," painted by Leslie Hamilton. "Arrah, 'tis Misther Hamilton himself!
At last—my own self, my green tam, my brown coat over the blue-checked apron, chewing a stick of Black Jack, hung over the railing and for five whole minutes and watched the men on the steel skeleton. All the time my salary was going on just the same. I was hoping the boss would tip me—say, a dime—for running his errands. Otherwise I might never get a tip from anyone. He did not.
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