blood smears on his face, and his lip was hurt. Mother happened to be right there when he came in, and she looked first thing at Mrs. Worden, and she said her eyes flashed fire. She stood right in her tracks, looking in her husband’s face, and her hands were shut tight, and at last she said, and her voice cut like a knife: ‘_How did you get your hurt, Mr. Worden?_’ and he looked away across the room and mumbled something about ‘sky-larking with a fellow who was drunk and hit harder than he knew,’ and she, as white as death and as cold as ice, said: ‘You lie, you coward! You lie! Not even a drunken man fights with his nails! A woman did that work for you--’ and she threw open the door and pointed for him to go, but in came the two children in their gowns, with the nurse behind, to tell them both good-night. Her arm fell like a log, and she made a spring and caught him by the shoulder and turned him so the young ones couldn’t see his face, and pushed him towards her dressin’-room and said all in one moment, ‘poor daddy! has got hurted, so mammy must tell you good-night alone this time,’ and when she kissed them the boy said, ‘Sall ’ou tiss him hurt, mammy?’ and she says: ‘God knows! God knows!’ and mother said she got away with the dresses she was carryin’ and only knows that Myra nursed him faithfully till he was able to face the world again, and for her pay, one week later he left her, to follow the third-rate actress, who beat him in her drunken frenzies--like the dog he was. He left a letter for her. My mother stood, shaking like a leaf with fright, but Mrs. Worden stood like a rock and read it all out loud: ‘How he was not her equal, how she had been too generous and too kind,’ and then mother said he quite worked up there, and blamed her hard for not flying out at him when he done wrong. He said he could have stood it better if she had abused him, but she held her tongue or only spoke gently to him, and at the very end that’s what he said, ‘You should have lashed me, I could have understood that, but your tongue was not sharp enough,’ and then she stopped, my mother said, and then she read that line again, ‘your tongue was not sharp enough,’ and then, says she, with blazing eyes and white lips, ‘By God! no other man shall make that complaint of me! I’ll sharpen my tongue like a serpent’s, and adder’s poison shall lurk under my lips!’ and then suddenly she began to laugh and laughed and laughed, and while we all went a running for doctors, she laughed her way into the fever that came nigh to killin’ her.”