Edith took the knitting, and went to her favorite chair in the back window. The room had grown smoky in consequence of Mrs. Rowan's piling of soft wood on to the fire, and hurrying about past the fireplace, so she pushed up the window, and fastened it with a wooden button fixed there for the purpose. Then she began to knit and think, and, forgetting Mrs. Rowan's directions, pulled the yarn so tightly over her fingers that she worked a hard, stiff strip across the heel, into which the looser knitting puckered. The child was too much absorbed to be aware of her mistake, and it did not matter; for that stocking was never to be finished. While she dreamed there, a deeper shadow than that of the clay bank fell over her. She looked up with a start, and saw Mr. Rowan standing outside the window. He had placed himself so as to avoid being seen by any one in the room, and was just turning his eyes away from her when she caught sight of him. "Lean out here!" he said. "I want to speak to you." She leaned out and waited. "What makes you stare at me the way you sometimes do?" he asked angrily, but in a low voice, that his wife might not hear. "Why don't you say right out what you think?" "I don't know what I do think," replied Edith, dropping her eyes. "You think that I am a wretch!" he exclaimed. "You think I am a drunkard! You think I abuse my wife!" She neither answered nor looked up. He paused a moment, then went on fiercely. "If there is anything I hate, it is to have people look at me that way, and say nothing. If you scold a man, it looks as if you thought there was something in him that could tell black from white; and if you are impudent, you put yourself a little in the wrong, and that helps him. He isn't so much ashamed of himself. But when you just look, and say nothing, you shut him out. It is as much as to tell him that words would be thrown away on him." "But," Edith objected, much at a loss, "if I answered you back, or said what I thought, there would be a quarrel right off." "Did I fight when Dick gave me such a hauling-over before he went away?" the man questioned in a rough tone that did not hide how his voice broke, and his blood-shot eyes filled up with tears. "Didn't I hang my head, and take it like a dog? He said I had acted like a brute, but he didn't say I was one, and he didn't say but I could be a man yet, if I should try. Wasn't I sober for three months after he went away? Yes; and I would have kept sober right on if I had had some one to thorn and threaten me. But she gave up, and did nothing but whimper, and it maddened me. When I ordered her to mix my rum for me, she did it. I should have liked her better if she had thrown it, tumbler and all, into my face." "You'd better not find fault with her," said Edith. "She's a great deal better than you are." The child had a gentle, sincere way of saying audacious things sometimes that made one wonder if she knew how audacious they were.