United States or South Korea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When it was explained to her that a man was to be put into the shop to give her a holiday, Mrs. Day refused the indulgence. Her heart was broken, but she was not ill. To have had a little time to give to Franky to take him for walks in the country, to read to him, to help him with his favourite occupation of painting old numbers of the Illustrated News and Punch would have been a joy.
He has hinted to our children that he would rather they wouldn't come about his yard to play with his children, which I can bear, and bear easy enough, for they're not a sort we want to associate with much but what I can't bear with any quietness at all, is his telling Franky our bill was running pretty high this morning when I sent him for some meal and that was all he said, too didn't give him the meal turned off and went to talking with the Hargrave girls about some stuff they wanted to cheapen."
Franky, having pulled his mother's face down to his own, was whispering, "What is it, mama? What is the matter with Bessie, now? Does she feel sick?" To feel sick was Franky's idea of the greatest earthly misery. Having wiped her eyes on Deleah's handkerchief Bessie rolled it into a ball and flung it across the table, with greater force of will than directness of aim, at Bernard's face.
"I am second English governess at Miss Chaplin's school for young ladies. I earn enough there to buy my own clothes and Franky's." Her courage was coming back to her; instead of the difficulty she had experienced in dragging out the words necessary to explain and condone her errand, she now had the impulse to tell him things, to make him confidences. "And who is Franky?" "He is my little brother.
Franky, who had been sent to bed several hours before the rest, was sound asleep. There were nine years between this child and Deleah; Franky was the baby, the darling of them all. The mother, tired as she was with the duties and responsibilities of the evening, stood long to look upon the sleeping face of the boy.
It was an absurd little incident, forgotten until now, when it awoke in her memory to wring the mother's heart without almost intolerable pain. Banished! Not good enough to sit at the table with Bessie her Franky, her baby, her angel boy! In her heart she knew the boy had not cared, that, a few tears shed, his meal was as welcome to him in one part of the room as the other.
"We will keep our sitting-room, at least, free of the shop, thank you," she said. "If Mr. Gibbon doesn't like being in here alone, mayn't he bring his pipe and see us chop in the kitchen," Franky suggested. The lodger had become possessed of a pistol, bought second-hand, with a view to practise on the stray cats who made a happy meeting-place of the Days' back yard.
She spoke, or laughed, or sighed, and the change in his face showed that he listened. Bessie had to call his name sharply twice before his attention was gained. Franky would ask some question about the mixing of his paints. The man would answer with a kind of anxious politeness, getting up to look over the child's shoulder.
If only the girls could find homes Deleah she knew would provide for Franky she would shut up the hateful shop, would give up the humiliating struggle she being an earthen vessel to swim with the hateful Coman who was of iron. She would then, she thought, go to bed and to sleep, and would sleep and sleep, and never get up again.
By Deleah's plate a letter was lying. A letter at which she looked dubiously, shrinking a little from opening it; for it was addressed, in a fashion which had become embarrassingly familiar to her, in carefully printed characters. "It's money, this time, we think," Franky cried, jumping in his chair. "Make haste, Deda." "We're simply dying to know what he's sent you. How slow you are!"
Word Of The Day