Page:The Prussian officer, and other stories, Lawrence, 1914.djvu/81

 Nottingham, going through the big warehouses to buy her goods. But the fret of managing her sons she did not like. Only she loved her youngest boy, because he was her last, and she saw herself free.

This was one of the houses the clergyman visited occasionally. Mrs. Durant, as part of her regulation, had brought up all her sons in the Church. Not that she had any religion. Only, it was what she was used to. Mr. Durant was without religion. He read the fervently evangelical “Life of John Wesley” with a curious pleasure, getting from it a satisfaction as from the warmth of the fire, or a glass of brandy. But he cared no more about John Wesley, in fact, than about John Milton, of whom he had never heard.

Mrs. Durant took her chair to the table.

“I don’t feel like eating,” she sighed.

“Why—aren’t you well?” asked the clergyman, patronizing.

“It isn’t that,” she sighed. She sat with shut, straight mouth. “I don’t know what’s going to become of us.”

But the clergyman had ground himself down so long, that he could not easily sympathize.

“Have you any trouble?” he asked.

“Ay, have I any trouble!” cried the elderly woman. “I shall end my days in the workhouse.”

The minister waited unmoved. What could she know of poverty, in her little house of plenty!

“I hope not,” he said.

“And the one lad as I wanted to keep by me——” she lamented.