Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/107

 It was not possible to avoid being irritated a little by such a woman, but I always tried to conceal this from her. I suppose she had a right to her own play-world. She was dressed now in a limp black of many rusty ruffles that sagged close to her and glistened in spots through its rust. Both the dress and the spiritless silk bonnet that circled her keen little face seemed to have been cried over a long time—to be always damp with her tears.

With parting injunctions to my namesake to let the cat alone, not to "track up" the kitchen, and not to play with matches, the little woman lovingly cuffed the conspiring lesser Sullivans into a decorous line behind her and marched them off to church. There, I knew, she would give from her poor wage that the soul of dead Terry should be the sooner prayed out of a place which, it would seem, might have been created with an eye single to his just needs.

Thinking of woman's love,—that, like the peace of God it passeth all understanding,—I officiated absently as one of two guests at a "tea-party." My fellow-guest was a large doll braced stiffly in its chair; a doll whose waxen face had been gouged by vandal nails. That was an old tragedy, though a sickening one at the time. The doll had been my Christmas offering to the woman child, and in the dusk of that joyous day my namesake had craved of its proud mother the boon of holding it a little while. Relinquished trustingly to him, he had sat with it by a cheerful fire—without evil intent, I do