'It's all very well, mother, but when a girl gets married she takes her husband, I have always understood, for better or worse, just as a man takes his wife. To tell the truth, it seems to me Amy has put herself in the wrong. It's deuced unpleasant to go and live in back streets, and to go without dinner now and then, but girls mustn't marry if they're afraid to face these things.'
'Don't talk so monstrously, John!' exclaimed his mother. 'How could Amy possibly foresee such things? The case is quite an extraordinary one.'
'Not so uncommon, I assure you. Some one was telling me the other day of a married lady--well educated and blameless--who goes to work at a shop somewhere or other because her husband can't support her.'
'And you wish to see Amy working in a shop?'
'No, I can't say I do. I'm only telling you that her bad luck isn't unexampled. It's very fortunate for her that she has good-natured relatives.'
Amy had taken a seat apart. She sat with her head leaning on her hand.
'Why don't you go and see Reardon?' John asked of his mother.
'What would be the use? Perhaps he would tell me to mind my own business.'
'By jingo! precisely what you would be doing. I think you ought to see him and give him to understand that he's behaving in a confoundedly ungentlemanly way. Evidently he's the kind of fellow that wants stirring up. I've half a mind to go and see him myself. Where is this slum that he's gone to live in?'
'We don't know his address yet.'
'So long as it's not the kind of place where one would be afraid of catching a fever, I think it wouldn't be amiss for me to look him up.'
'You'll do no good by that,' said Amy, indifferently.
'Confound it! It's just because nobody does anything that things have come to this pass!'
The conversation was, of course, profitless. John could only return again and again to his assertion that Reardon must get 'a decent berth.' At length Amy left the room in weariness and disgust.
'I suppose they have quarrelled terrifically,' said her brother, as soon as she was gone.
'I am afraid so.'
'Well, you must do as you please. But it's confounded hard lines that you should have to keep her and the kid. You know I can't afford to contribute.'
'My dear, I haven't asked you to.'
'No, but you'll have the devil's own job to make ends meet; Iknow that well enough.'
'I shall manage somehow.'
'All right; you're a plucky woman, but it's too bad. Reardon's a humbug, that's my opinion. I shall have a talk with Carter about him. I suppose he has transferred all their furniture to the slum?'
'He can't have removed yet. It was only this morning that he went to search for lodgings.'
'Oh, then I tell you what it is: I shall look in there the first thing to-morrow morning, and just talk to him in a fatherly way.
You needn't say anything to Amy. But I see he's just the kind of fellow that, if everyone leaves him alone, he'll be content with Carter's five-and-twenty shillings for the rest of his life, and never trouble his head about how Amy is living.'
To this proposal Mrs Yule readily assented. On going upstairs she found that Amy had all but fallen asleep upon a settee in the drawing-room.
'You are quite worn out with your troubles,' she said. 'Go to bed, and have a good long sleep.'
'Yes, I will.'
The neat, fresh bedchamber seemed to Amy a delightful haven of rest. She turned the key in the door with an enjoyment of the privacy thus secured such as she had never known in her life; for in maidenhood safe solitude was a matter of course to her, and since marriage she had not passed a night alone. Willie was fast asleep in a little bed shadowed by her own. In an impulse of maternal love and gladness she bent over the child and covered his face with kisses too gentle to awaken him.