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My feelings were hurt, not the less so that I knew that the large cloth which covered the middle of the floor, and which the women call a bocking, had been bought and nailed down there, after a solemn family-counsel, as the best means of concealing the too evident darns which years of good cheer had made needful in our stanch old household friend, the three-ply carpet, made in those days when to be a three-ply was a pledge of continuance and service.
"I did the best I could with them, Steve, but they look pretty crumby," Nadia wrinkled her nose as she studied the anything but invisible seams, darns, and staring patches everywhere so evident, both in her own apparel of gray silk and in the heavy whipcord clothing of her companion. "You did a great job, considering what you had to work with," he reassured her.
When the paraffin had burned away it was found that it had taken with it all the darns of Scotch heather-mixture fingering. Only the fabric of the old carpet was left and that was full of holes. 'Come, said the Phoenix, 'I'm cool now. The four children got on to what was left of the carpet. Very careful they were not to leave a leg or a hand hanging over one of the holes.
"Why, Cyril, of course not! You you told me not to, long ago. You said my darns made bunches. "Ho! I meant I didn't want to wear them," retorted the man, upon whom the tragic wretchedness of that half-sobbed "bunches" had been quite lost. "I love to see you mending them," he finished, with an approving glance at the pretty little picture of domesticity before him.
"Nonsense, dear! Don't let that fret you," comforted Billy, promptly, trying not to laugh too hard. "It wasn't your darns; it was just darns anybody's darns. Cyril won't wear darned socks. Aunt Hannah told me so long ago, and I said then there'd be a tragedy when you found it out. So don't worry over that." "Oh, but that isn't all," moaned Marie. "Listen!
"Plain over-and-over," how well it illustrated what their young days and the disposal of them had been. Miss Craydocke thought of the darns; her story cannot be told here; but she knew what it meant to have the darns of life fall to one's share, to have the filling up to do, with dexterousness and pains and sacrifice, of holes that other people make!
They lived in a bare, forlorn old house, with nothing attractive about it save the floor of the sala, which was of beautiful hard wood polished with banana leaves until it would have served for a mirror. Everything was scrupulously clean, but bespoke poverty, from the inadequate furniture of the sala to the patches and darns on the old wife's stiffly starched skirt of abaca.
His clothes were a fine, deep, glossy black; and yet they looked like the same suit; nay, there were the very darns with which old acquaintance had made us familiar. The hat, too—nobody could mistake the shape of that hat, with its high crown gradually increasing in circumference towards the top. Long service had imparted to it a reddish-brown tint; but, now, it was as black as the coat.
Before Ruth's eyes there arose, as in a vision, the patches on the under-sleeves of her morning blouse, the faded dressing-gown, the darns, and make-shifts and pitiful little contrivances of poverty. Her cheeks flamed before the sharp eyes of the abigail, and then flamed again with scorn at her own folly. "It is all neat and clean and tidy.
"Thank you," she said with crisp coldness; "but, distasteful as darns and patches are to us, we prefer them, infinitely, to charity!" "Oh, but, please, I didn't mean you didn't understand," faltered Billy. For answer Alice Greggory walked deliberately to the door and held it open. "Oh, Alice, my dear," pleaded Mrs. Greggory again, feebly. "Come, Billy!
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