Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/16

 decided to sell him up. The butcher and the baker, despairing of getting their bills paid, declined further orders. Poor Bridget had been lately feeding herself and the children on milk and potatoes, last year's bacon, and what eggs the fowls, not too well fed themselves, kindly produced.

Jenny had helped them many a time, from womanly pity. But for her, they would often have been without the 'damper' bread, which served to fill up crevices with the hungry brood—not that she expected return or payment, but as she said, 'How could I see the poor things hungry, while we have a snug home and all we can eat and drink?'

Then she would mentally compare Bill's industry with Dick's neglect, and a feeling of wifely pride would thrill her heart as she returned to her comfortable cottage and put her children, always neatly dressed, to sleep in their clean cots.

As she sat before the fire, near the trimly-swept hearth, which looked so pleasant and homely, though there was but a wooden slab chimney with a stone facing, a vision arose before her of prosperous days when they would have a ring fence round their own and the Donahues' farm—perhaps even an 'additional conditional lease,' to be freehold eventually—afterwards a flock of sheep and who knows what in the years to come.

'The Donahues, poor things, would have to sell and go away, that was certain; they couldn't prevent them being sold up—and, of course, Bill might as well buy it as another. The bank manager, Mr. Calthorpe, would sell the place, partly on credit, trusting Bill for the remainder, with security on both farms, because he was sober and industrious. Indeed, he told Bill so last week. What a thing it was to have a good name! When she thought of the way other women's husbands "knocked down" their money after shearing, forty and fifty pounds, even more, in a week's drunken bout, she felt that she could not be too thankful.

'Now Bill, when shearing was over, generally took a small sum in cash—just enough to see him home, and paid in the cheque for the season's shearing to his bank account. It was over sixty pounds last year, for he sold his spare horse—a thirty-shilling colt out of the pound, that he had broken in himself—to the overseer, for ten guineas, and rode home on