Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/361

Rh people." Her face lit with pleasure. "Thank yeh, sur. It's a touch o' the sun I had." She shuffled along beside him. "I 'll b' all right in the shade o' the houses."

They made an odd pair. The old soldier had nothing of the gaunt veteran in his appearance; he was a small man who had not wholly lost a corpulence that must have been heavy on him in middle age. Mrs. Dolan, almost his equal in height, was a rotund little grandmother, muffled in her shawl that came nearly to her knees, and in a skirt that dragged below her heels. She talked incessantly.

He spoke only once, and that was when he was helping her across Fifth Avenue. He asked her whether there was no one in the city to take care of her. She replied with tales of the kindness of the neighbors, particularly of those who had helped her during the winter months when she had been sick and in want. The street, however, was going to the bad; the houses were filling with "Eyetalyans" that feared neither God nor man. A family, in the room above her, worked their sewing-machines from morning till night on Easter Sunday itself. "Thim Guinnys!"

She lived in a rear tenement—to which they entered from the street through a hall as dirty and dark as a rat-hole. She invited him to have a cup of tea with her; and he stumbled after her, up the stairway, the tread-boards of which were covered with tin. She led him into a narrow room that was at once her kitchen, her parlor, her dining-room, and her laundry. A