Again no answer. Myles was buttering a piece of bread. His eyebrows were contracted again. The serpent in that Eden was the contentious woman. Myles never answered her complaints, on principle, for fear of saying something outrageous and unbecoming, but it was often with a sore struggle that he abstained: he did not want to become a household bully, or he knew--he had found it out by accident one day--that a certain look and tone of his could quell Mrs. Heywood’s temper in one minute. He was very much afraid of using it too frequently, though often sorely provoked. ‘Such people as Sebastian Mallory,’ he reflected (whose mother was said to live for him and his happiness), ‘were not obliged to stay in one room, listening to maddening complaints, like the continual dropping of a rainy day, with no alternative but solitude, silence, or the taproom.’ Edmund’s shoulders were drawn up to his ears, and his back expressed distinctly that he felt himself jarred and grated in every fibre of his being. ‘Now, then, Edmund,’ said his mother, in her thin, penetrating voice; ‘art comin’ to the table, or mun thou have thy tea carried to thee, to drink on th’ sofa, like a lady, eh?’ Answering to this appeal, he raised himself, his face darkened, his lips quivering with anger. ‘That’s right!’ said he, bitterly. ‘Do insult me a little more! It’s so nice to be ill, and so pleasant to spend your days by yourself upon a sofa in a kitchen. I’m likely to keep it up as long as ever I can. So would you if once you knew how agreeable it was.’ He had supported himself by means of a stick to the table; and as he limped along to the chair which Mary had placed for him, one could see how much deformed he was, and how clumsily he moved. No look of pity warmed the woman’s face as she saw him. He was not, like many a weakly or deformed child, the object of the mother’s divinest love and tenderest care. He had been born three months after his father’s sudden death. Mrs. Heywood had never been noted for enthusiastic devotion to any of her children, or to her husband, or, indeed, to any one but herself and her own interest. Myles could influence her; but she seemed to have a positive aversion to Edmund, who used to say that his real mother was Mary. When the meal was over, there was a little movement. Edmund looked wistfully towards Myles and the book; but Myles did not offer to resume it. He had begun to think over that conversation in the office before pay-time, and was wondering whether it could be really true that Sebastian Mallory meant to return.