Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/274

262 into taking more. "Yuh sh'u'd never stop eatin', man," she said, till yer hands 're too tired to feed yuh."

He ate until he was red in the face; and then she brought him his pipe and let him talk. He talked shop—as Joliffe used to do—and she listened as if the ambitions and jealousies of Altgelt's grocery department were the most interesting gossip. "Yuh 'll be startin' up store some day fer yersilf?" she asked. He replied that he would as soon as he had saved the necessary capital. "Then yuh need n't worry about the house," she said. "It 'll cost yuh less than it did fer board, er I 'm a Dutchman. Hetty 'll want nex' to nothin' fer clothes. She sews her own. An' I 'll look after the kitchen till she gets the hang o' housekeepin'. We 'll be millionaires this day next week."

He went to bed, gorged and optimistic, and relieved of half the worries of a newly married man. He had been aware that Hetty was the sort of wife to grace any station in life to which his business success might raise him, but he had been afraid that she might prove rather expensive at first. "Now he was assured, that with her mother's aid, their beginning would prove as easy as their end would be glorious.

Mrs. Joliffe remained for an hour in the kitchen, washing the supper dishes and setting the table for breakfast, as satisfied as if she had been for a year out of work and had just found "a job." She took a last fond look at the table before she reluctantly put out the light. And neither she nor Bailey suspected that there