THE ENGLISH REVIEW

"Ay," he sighed, wiping his mouth. "I've repented the
day I ever let you have him."

He put his hand on the lever. The little engine strained
and groaned, and the train rumbled towards the crossing. The
woman again looked across the metals. Darkness was settling
over the spaces of the railway, and the trucks : the miners, in
grey sombre groups, were still passing home. The winding-
engine pulsed hurriedly, with brief pauses. Elizabeth Bates
looked at the dreary flow of men, then she went indoors. Her
husband did not come.

The kitchen was small and full of firelight; red coals piled
glowing up the chimney mouth. All the life of the room
seemed in the white, warm hearth and the steel fender reflecting
the red fire. The cloth was laid for tea ; cups glinted in the
shadows. At the back, where the lowest stairs protruded into
the room, the boy sat struggling with a knife and a piece of
white wood. He was almost hidden in the shadow. It was
half-past four. They had but to await the father's coming to
begin tea. As the mother watched her son's sullen little
struggle with the wood, she saw herself in his silence and
pertinacity ; she saw the father in her child's indifference to
all but himself. Walter Bates counted nothing but his own
pleasure and interest. Even now he had probably gone past
his home, slouched past his own door, to drink before he came
in, while his dinner spoiled and wasted in waiting. She glanced
at the clock, then took the potatoes to strain them in the yard.
The garden and fields beyond the brook were closed in uncertain
darkness. When she rose with the saucepan, leaving the drain
steaming into the night behind her, she saw the yellow lamps
were lit along the high road that went up the hill away beyond
the space of the railway lines and the field.

Then again she watched the men trooping home, fewer now
and fewer.

Indoors the fire was sinking and the room was dark red.
The woman put her saucepan on the hob, and set a batter
pudding near the mouth of the oven. Then she stood un-
moving. Directly, gratefully, came quick young steps to the
door. A child hung on the latch a moment, then a little girl
entered and began pulling off her clothes, dragging a mass of curls,
just ripening from gold to brown, over her eyes with her hat.

Her mother chid her for coming late from school, and said
she would have to keep her at home the dark winter days.

"Why, mother, it's hardly a bit dark yet. The lamp's not
lighted, and my father's not home."

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