Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/42

30 ," in the days when he, after school hours, used to go on the streets to shine shoes or sell newspapers or do whatever else came to hand to earn an honest penny. She was working for him still, but no longer going out scrubbing and taking in washing and stitching ulsters at night on a sewing-machine at twenty cents an ulster. (It was the machine that had made her voice so loud; she had been used to talking while she worked it.) Now she sat at home "like a lady," and only sewed and mended and cooked and scrubbed and swept and dusted and washed and ironed for him; and only sat up late at night till he had gone to bed, so that she might tuck him in; for she believed that if she did not watch him so, he would be sure to kick the covers off his legs in the night, like a big baby, and catch "his death o' cold."

"He 's late," she said, for the twentieth time. "I wonder what 's keepin' him."

She would see him as soon as he turned the street corner far below her, and she would hurry back to the kitchen where the dinner was all ready to be whisked out of the oven to the table. As soon as he opened the door of the fiat, she would call "Is that yerself?" and he would reply with a cheerful grunt of assent. ("He never talks till he's fed—poor boy.") There would be no kisses, no embraces of affection, no show of love between them. Her pot pie, her biscuits, and her English breakfast tea "with a pinch o' Paykoe in it" were her caresses; she would ply him with them, beaming on him fondly, every helping affectionate and every bite