Potter, however, did not stir; and for a time there was no sound except the thumping of Ellen’s iron on the thickly padded board. She was thumping harder than need be, because she was angry. She was often angry with him. Yet his prolonged visits with her in the kitchen or on the back stoop of a fine afternoon meant much to her. The family already teased her, calling young Osprey “Ellen’s pet.” Then Tom Meadowburn reminded them that “Ellen always had a pet. Remember Wolly Judson.” This sally caused an uproar. Wolly Judson had been a Winnipegian of sixty-eight, a town character, a tottering flirt, who had brought the current gossip regularly to Ellen’s door. Potter heard none of this chaffing, yet in his talks with her he betrayed a small opinion of the Meadowburns, all except his friend Bennet, with whom he sang in the choir. Once he told her indignantly that she worked too hard, she was spoiling the whole family. Why didn’t the others do more? Ellen laughed heartily. She did not believe any such thing. It was her lot to work, and keep at it until things were done. Ellen was neither by birth nor legal adoption a member of the Meadowburn household. She lived there, a fixture; and the principal advantages did accrue to the family. They obtained a willing, strong and tireless servant, modest and well-appearing enough to be treated as a distant relative (and consequently not paid except when chance generosity dictated). She had been with the Meadowburns since she was twelve, learning by heart their various needs so that she could have administered to them in her sleep. She was now twenty-seven, a gaunt figure, black-eyed and above the middle height. The face would have been attractive but for the toughened swarthiness it had acquired, and the cheeks perceptibly sunken by the absence of jaw teeth. The Meadowburn children had grown up under her care, the two eldest girls being little more than babies at the time the orphan asylum in New Orleans yielded her young and frightened body into the hands of Mrs. Meadowburn. Ellen had found time for those fretful and ill-tempered midgets, in addition to keeping the house spotless, laundering for six and cooking the meals. Mrs. Meadowburn had been left free to nurse a collection of modern ills, and to dream of her youth as the dark beauty of a northwestern town. Since those days a morose gloom had settled upon her handsome, Indian-like face. Ellen had rarely known her to laugh at all. Even the smile with which she greeted her husband’s jokes was wan and half-hearted. It was to Ellen that Tom Meadowburn looked for the fullest appreciation of his comic genius and his masculine importance. Few men were more conscious of both than he, and even in those moments when the comic mask fell away completely, there was something in the solemn air of pompous judgment and disciplinary wisdom which to any one but his adoring brood would have seemed most funny.