“Oh! Yes ’m. I forgot.” He curled up the disgraced foot underneath him, for a reminder that it was to keep still. “The furniture,” Mrs. Mar went on, looking round the room, “is quite dilapidated enough without _your_ making it worse.” “Yes, ma’am.” “Well, I suppose I must go and attend to those children, and the supper. But don’t let him kick the furniture, Nathaniel, even if he is the son of your adored Galbraith. The owner of all that Rock Hill Mining property didn’t trouble himself much about _you_.” “Yes, he did. He was a very good friend,” and Mar made a slight movement as of one clearing a space in the air before setting to work again. His wife, in her progress to the door, halted mechanically in the middle of the patch, as though the momentary weight of her presence there would leave behind a subjugating effect. But she murmured absently: “I must have another hunt for—” Then, turning with sudden animation: “Is it you who’ve taken away my tack-hammer?” she demanded of Jack. “No, ma’am.” “Well, understand,” she went on, precisely as though he had admitted his responsibility for the disappearance of the tool, “understand you’re to sit there till supper, and this is the last of your playing about that dirty duck-pond.” “I forgot it was Sunday,” he said, penitent. “Sunday or any other day—never again.” Jack gasped with incredulity, and then, slowly, “You don’t weally mean we’re never to go to ve pond for ever and ever!” “Well, just you try it! And you’ll find yourself going back to school to spend your holidays with the janitor.” In the pause that followed this awful threat Jack murmured: “Never go a-sploring any more!” and then sat as one paralyzed by an awful and unexpected blow. Mrs. Mar replaced the handleless cup upon the table, and took up the corner of the cloth to determine the extent of a damage wrought in the last washing. “Everything we possess seems to be giving out at once—like the different parts of the One Hoss Shay. It’s exactly”—she turned her bright, dark eyes toward the writing-table, and spoke with a sudden access of vigor—“exactly as if there was a law that allowed you for months and years to patch and tinker, to bolster up your rickety furniture, to darn your old carpets, to reseat your old chairs, to make over the clothes, to solder the saucepans, and keep things going generally, up to a given moment. But when that moment comes”—she lifted her finger Sibyl-like in the air—“every blessed belonging begins to crack, or fray, or creak with the pangs of approaching dissolution. Are you listening to what I say, Nathaniel? There isn’t a thing in this house that doesn’t need to be renewed.” She spoke with a directness that seemed pointedly to include her husband among the dilapidations. He, half-absent, half-speculative, looked round upon objects familiar to him from childhood.