All through the fortnight of Alice’s lying-in Mrs Moseley did her best to keep the peace of the house and to reconcile Abner to the new state of things. She made him feel almost as much at home as he had been in the old days, limping downstairs in the evening to talk to him. Alice was very jealous when she heard them talking below. On most evenings they sat alone in the kitchen together, but sometimes they went out into the strip of garden at the back of the house to a wooden bench screened by a straggling hedge of scarlet runners. They sat there, often in silence, till the sky darkened, reflecting above the western horizon all the furnaces of Mawne; and no one disturbed them, for John Fellows, having once yielded to the bottle, had continued his celebrations of the event. After all, such things didn’t happen very often. One evening Mrs Moseley brought down the baby for Abner to see. ‘Look at him, Abner,’ she said, ‘bain’t he a pretty dear? bain’t he a little lovee?’ Whatever the baby may have been he certainly wasn’t pretty; but there was something in his helplessness that appealed to Abner’s generosity. In spite of his prejudices he couldn’t see himself being vindictive toward this comical creature. He touched the baby’s downy, wrinkled face with his hand. The creature made a sucking noise, seeking Abner’s fingers with his lips, and at the same moment Tiger, with a snarl, took Abner’s calf between his teeth, and, with the gentlest pressure, threatened to bite him. ‘There you are,’ said Mrs Moseley. ‘Look at jealousy! You and Tiger are a pair, and that’s the truth!’ He laughed, but for all that he didn’t look forward happily to Mrs Moseley’s departure. He felt that the baby would only serve to make Alice more intolerably important. When, on the thirteenth night, a dead-white, incredibly diminished Alice came down to sit for a couple of hours on the sofa, he decided to ask Mrs Moseley to take him into her house as a lodger. ‘The money will come in handy,’ he urged. ‘I could sleep in the washhouse with old Tiger.’ But she wouldn’t think of it. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t like to put your father out, not if it was ever so! John’s been a good friend to me. I don’t know how I could have lived all these years without him.’ ‘He’s got a sight more out of yo’ than ever yo’ got out of him!’ Abner grumbled. But again she said ‘No’—partly, it is true, because she felt that Alice might make it the occasion for a quarrel, and partly because, much as she loved Abner she knew that her strength would not allow her to look after him properly. On many days of late she hadn’t really been fit to do her own housework, and so she fought shy, for Abner’s sake as much as her own, of the arrangement that he suggested. The money, alas! was very tempting.