oman knew what poverty meant, and she had four young children. It
was the thought of these helpless ones crying with hunger (she could hear
them already, her ears were dinned with their hungry lamentation) that
took the fibre out of her arms, and left her without any fight. She
could only sit and look with wretched eyes on the man whom she had been
demoralising, and, for the first time since he knew her, the tears came,
and the poor woman laid her head on the kitchen table and wept.

He was astonished, he was dismayed, but he could not stand her tears: he
ran to her--the first time he ever did run to her--

"Sure, darling," said he, "is it crying you are? What would you be doing
that for? If I've lost one job I can get another. I'm not afraid of
work, and I know how to do it. I'll get something to do at once, if it's
only wheeling a handcart, or selling cockles in public-houses. Wisha,
dry your eyes--they're as pretty as they ever were," said he, trying to
look at them, while his wife, with a strange shyness, would not let him
see, for she felt that there was a strange man with her, some one she did
not know. That was a man's hand on her shoulder, and she had never felt
a man's hand before, as long as she was married.

"I'll go out at once," said he, "and when I come in to-night I'll have a
job if I have to bang it out of some one with a shovel."

He slapped on his hat, kicked the soap out of the way, tramped through
the water on the floor, and when at the door he turned again and came
back to kiss his wife, a form of caress which had long fallen into
desuetude, and so, out into the street, a man again.

When he had gone his wife returned to her scrubbing, and, as she worked
she smiled at something she was remembering, and, now and again, a bit of
a song came from lips that had scolded so much. Having finished her work
she spent nearly an hour at the looking-glass doing up her hair (grand
hair it was, too) with her ears listening for a footstep. Now and again
she would run to the pot to see were the potatoes doing all right--"The
children will be in shortly," said she, "and hungry to the bone, poor
dears."

But she was not thinking of the children. The warmth of a kiss was still
on her lips. Something in the back of her head was saying--"He will do
it again when he comes in."

And the second honeymoon was pleasanter than the first.

III

She was tall and angular. Her hair was red, and scarce, and untidy.
Her