Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/198

186 carry them out to the kitchen to be washed, she stooped over them and cuddled them and laughed.

It was some six weeks later that Mr. Philip Carney, in his shirt-sleeves, with his pipe in his mouth and his wife on his knee, sat in the breeze of the parlor window, enjoying the evening air. "Well," he said, "how d' yuh like bein' married?"

She tweaked his sunburned nose smilingly, cooing to him in the ridiculous "baby talk" that seems to be the universal language of young married couples.

He rescued his pipe. "Here," he laughed. "Don't do that. Yuh tickle the roof o' me mouth."

She pinched his lips, puckering up the cut she had given him in Dublin Row when she struck her "Philly wif 'm hatchet," as she said. There was a sort of fierce playfulness in her manner, a rough fondness that was all she had left of her old imperious treatment of him.

"Huh!" he teased her. "That ain't the way yuh talked that night when yuh lef ' me 'n Nint' Av—"

She clapped a hand over his mouth. "You promised you 'd never—"

He caught away her hand. "A' right," he said. "Not another word about it.… But how did yuh like the furnished flat that day— Ouch!"

She was pulling his hair. "Shut up, then, will you?"

"Ow! Ye-e-es! Quit it! I 'll shut up."

She settled back against his shoulder. He grunted