Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/45

Rh pushed away his plate and tilted back his chair comfortably, he said: "We could get a fine big flat uptown for what we pay here. It would n't  take me any longer to get home, either, now. We don't have to live down here. We could move for next to nothing—five or ten dollars."

He had evidently been leading up to that proposal, diplomatically; and with equal diplomacy she evaded it. She did not reply that this was her home; that all her friends were about her here; that the church in which she had been married, in which he had been christened, in which she had heard mass for the last thirty years, was just around the corner—to say nothing of her grocer and her butcher! She suggested merely: "Yuh 'd miss the boys."

This referred to the younger members of the Dan Healy Democratic Association in which he was a stalwart. "Oh, well," he said, easily, "I been thinking of giving all that up any way. There 's nothin' in it for me. I  got my work. I don't need to live off politics. I 've sort o' cut it out lately."

For some weeks past he had been going out every night; and he had let her suppose that he was spending his evenings in the rooms of the association, helping to prepare for the coming campaign. She rose to clear the table, so that, under cover of the activity, she might have time to think.

"I met the Senator on the street to-day," he said, "an' told him."

"Told him what?"