Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/196

184 dumb reproach. Her face changed slowly, her eyebrows still knitted in a scowl that began to twitch uncertainly, her mouth trembling in a doubtful slant.

When she came back to him in the front room, she took him by the two ears, from behind, and shook his head from side to side. "Darn you, Phil," she said, between laughing and crying, "if you ain't the darnedest big baby—"

He turned around and saw her face. "Well, say—"

She had come to marriage as a strayed cat comes to a saucer of milk, with a boldness that is born of hunger, and a tense wariness that does not relax under the first caress. To escape from her single life of self-supported loneliness, she would have married any one of whom she was not altogether afraid; and she was not afraid of Carney. She had for him a feeling that was slightly contemptuous even when it was most tender—a feeling that held him off and smiled at him with an amused tolerance, at best.

It was with this smile that she sat down to their cold dinner. But in the middle of the meal, she gathered—from something Carney said—that he did not expect her to go back to her work in Sturm & Bergman's; and she was struck dumb. She had been prepared to work until the care of a family should keep her at home. She listened to him with a pathetic expression of wistfulness and doubt, while he—in clumsy apology for having furnished the flat without consulting her—took out his bank-book and explained his indebtedness to the "Furniture Emporium." "The stuff ain't all