t another penny from her father's
hands. She was comparatively little interested in the discussion about
poetry. Ron was a dear boy; she would be sorry if he were disappointed,
but Jack was her life, and Jack was working for bread!

If she had followed the moment's impulse, she would have risen and left
the room, and though better counsel prevailed, she could not control the
spice of temper which made the cherry-pie abhorrent.

Jack, as a man, saw no reason why he should deny himself the mitigations
of the situation; he helped himself to cream and sifted sugar with
leisurely satisfaction, and sensibly softened in spirit. After all,
there was a measure of truth in what the old man said, and his bark was
worse than his bite. If his own boy, Pat, took it into his head to go
off on some scatter-brain prank when he came of age, it would be a big
trouble, or if later on he came a cropper in business-- Jack waited for
a convenient pause, and then deftly turned the conversation to politics,
and by the time that cheese was on the table, he and his father-in-law
were discussing the mysteries of the last Education Bill with the
satisfaction of men who hold similar views on the inanities of the
opposite party. Later on they bade each other a friendly good-night;
but Edith went straight from the bedroom to the street, and clung
tightly to her husband's arm as they walked along the pavement opposite
the Park, enjoying the quiet before entering the busy streets.

"We'll never come again!" she cried tremulously. "We'll stay at home,
and have a supper of bread and cheese and love with it! You shan't be
taunted and sneered at by any man on earth, if he were twenty times my
father! What an angel you were, Jack, to keep quiet, and then talk as
if nothing had happened! I was choking with rage!"

"Poor darling!" said Jack Martin tenderly. "You take things too much to
heart. It's rough on you, but you must remember that it's rough on the
old man too. You are his eldest child, and the beauty of the family.
He hoped great things for you, and it is wormwood and gall to his proud
spirit to see you struggling along in cheap lodgings. We can't wonder
if he explodes occasionally. It's wonderful that he is as civil to me
as he is; he has put me down as a hopeless blunderer!"

There was a touch of bitterness in the speaker's voice, for all his
brave assumption of composure, and his wife winced at the sound. She
clung more tightly to