In spite of all her good resolutions she couldn’t help letting off a little of her unhappiness on him. It was against her will that she did so. Sometimes she cried with vexation at her own irritability and resolved to overcome it. Then, as the months dragged on, she began to wonder if it were worth while tiring herself out with good resolutions or anything else in the world. She found herself becoming wilfully vixenish with her husband. That didn’t matter, for she seldom saw him; but a little later a new emotion, stronger and more positively devastating than any that she had known before, seized her. It was a thing that she couldn’t understand. She felt as if some strange, dark spirit had invaded and perverted her consciousness, making her think madly and not in the least as she wanted to think, filling her with a mixture of hate and jealousy towards Abner. This passion would not let her be. However tired and jaded she were the fiend was ready to tear her. She could not see the boy without hating him. She felt just like a cat with kittens, who spits at the kittens of another cat. She had plenty of opportunities for showing her hatred. Abner was now fifteen. His schooling was finished, and he had begun to work at the colliery, leading the ponies that drag trollies of coal along the galleries of the pit. He found it quite good fun. The pony of which he had charge was very old and quite blind, for it had worked in Mawne pit since before Abner was born. He found it slower than a pony should be and spent the first Sunday after he had started work in searching Uffdown Wood for an ash-plant with which he might induce the pony to go faster. When he had found one he fitted a pin in the end of it. A few minutes after six every evening the cage would come clanking up to the pit-head, and before it settled with a jerk, Abner, black with coal-grime, would shoot out like a hare and go whistling home to his tea. He whistled because there was always a curious lightening of his heart at the change from the murk of the pit to daylight. It was spring when he started work. Every evening as he passed the cherry orchard he heard the whistle of a blackbird poised on the topmost bough of one of the foamy trees. He wondered exuberantly if he could find its nest some day. He even collected a couple of pebbles to put in the place of eggs. But when he got home there was no Mrs Moseley, waiting with a ‘piece’ ready buttered and a cup of steaming tea—only Alice, dragging about the kitchen, greeting him with jealous eyes. ‘Abner, you dirty little beast,’ she would say, ‘don’t you dare soil that table now. Mind your filthy hands! It’s summat to have your father, let alone yo’. Here, that’s your father’s towel. Loose it quick!’