Page:The Country-House Party.djvu/47

Rh be lepping at the news I had to tell her, if you had heard them fighting. But I knew better than to depend on a woman. So I stood at the door looking at her without saying a word, but all the time I was thinking what I would say to break the bad news.

'I need not have minded thinking, for the minute she saw me she began as if I had been in the middle of a conversation with her.

It's an ill day for a woman when she marries," said she, "what with mending, and feeding, and looking after himself all day, it's no life at all, at all. Look at me now," she says, turning herself, so I could see what a fine healthy woman she was; "would you ever think I was Moll D'Arcy, the gayest girl in the town? Sure, who would know me? Isn't it the desolation he has made of me?"

I'm thinking," I said slowly, when she stopped for breath, "he will give you no more trouble now."

Is it no more trouble?" she cried. "While there's a gasp in him he will give me trouble. In the house or out of it, it's all the same, trouble will follow him home and roost beside him."