Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/77

 and was roused sufficiently to remember that he had reason to wish to awake early this morning.

"That business which knocked Calvin up in the night," he recalled to his wife, when she heard him go out. "Ketlar killing his wife, you know."

"That terrible boy!" exclaimed Emily, and since the newspaper had not arrived, she waited up with Arthur until it was delivered; and then to them who had foreknowledge and who were only indirectly interested, the newspaper proved innocent of any report of the crime.

Another edition of the paper, printed much later than that which was circulated in the suburbs, lay upon the city doorstep of Ket's mother, who had no warning at all of what awaited her on the other side of the deal door of her kitchen, where she was getting breakfast for her husband.

She was a woman of fifty, slender of limb, full in bosom, with weary, gray eyes and with firm, regular features distinguished by a clear, flawless skin very like Ket's. Her hair once had been naturally light like his and when it had turned darker, she had bleached it yellow and afterwards kept it so. She was remarkable, in the manicure trade, for having preserved her attractiveness and youthfulness so that she was pleasing to men and so had held her position in barbershops until she was almost forty.

She still kept her figure, but no amount of massaging now served to hide the crow's-feet edging her eyes or lifted the weariness from her lids; so, since she was obviously old, she no longer was wanted to manicure men's nails, and she had taken to washing women's hair for her living.

Two children she had borne—her first, when she was nineteen, a girl, who had been unwanted but loved passionately, and who had died in her first year through no