There was a good fire in the room and she put her hand into it. Sam was alert enough to drag her away before much damage was done, and he had oil on the hand in a moment. “Don’t fuss,” said Anne, “but tell me what you think.” “I think,” he said, “that you’re plumb crazy--with jealousy.” It was not craziness, but fanatic devotion to an idea: and the idea was Sam, Sam’s happiness, Sam’s future. She put her hand into the fire hoping to convince, and she would have sat on the fire if she had thought the larger act would carry a fuller conviction. But he did not need to be convinced that she objected to Ada; the point was that her objections were unfounded, and, in the face of Ada’s sublime and stunning merits, idiotic. One cannot put a hand into the fire without suffering for it, and Anne was suffering acutely. Her face was drawn with pain and her lips were trembling uncontrollably, but her voice was firm. “I’ve done my best to save you, Sam. If you’ve nothing better to say than that, you and me have come to a parting.” “Then,” said Sam, “we’ve come,” and turned his back on her. He thought she would come round, that she would get over her attack of frenzied jealousy. It was idle threat to talk of a parting. Why, she was dependent on him, and in more ways than one. He housed and kept her, but, more than that, she needed him. His presence was the breath of life to her. He knew that, and he let her go! Of course, he thought she would come back, with a sharp lesson well learnt. She had to learn that he was grown-up, of an age to act for himself and choose and think without her tutelage. Only, she did not come back. She went to Madge and stayed with Madge; and the terms on which she stayed were her terms. “I furnish the room,” she said, “and I pay you a rent for it. Also, I pay for what I eat.” She paid. At the age of fifty-two the mother of Sara Branstone, of Branstone and Carter, and the mother-in-law of George Chappie, of the Chappie Window-Cleaning and Bill Posting Company (a smaller affair than its name, but the source of a regular five pounds a week), was a charwoman on three days out of the seven, and it was not lack of offers which limited her to three days, but the fact that she paid her way on three days’ result. She kept other people’s houses as clean as she had kept her own. It was suggested to George Chappie that it was hardly decent in him to allow his mother-in-law to go out charring at her age--a prosperous man like him. “I know,” he was reported to have replied, “and we’ve tried all ways we can. But you can’t argue with Mrs. Branstone.” “She’s one of the old sort, isn’t she?” said his gossip, who, perhaps, endured a mother-in-law of another kind. “All that,” said George succinctly. CHAPTER XIII--THE INTERMITTENT COURTSHIP