Of course that feeling wore off, same as any feeling will wear off sooner or later in a place like the Seven Brothers.  Cooped up in a place like that you come to know folks so well that you forget what they do look like.  There was a long time I never noticed her, any more than you’d notice the cat.  We used to sit of an evening around the table, as if you were Fedderson there, and me here, and her somewhere back there, in the rocker, knitting.  Fedderson would be working on his Jacob’s-ladder, and I’d be reading.  He’d been working on that Jacob’s-ladder a year, I guess, and every time the Inspector came off with the tender he was so astonished to see how good that ladder was that the old man would go to work and make it better.  That’s all he lived for.

If I was reading, as I say, I daren’t take my eyes off the book, or Fedderson had me.  And then he’d begin—­what the Inspector said about him.  How surprised the member of the board had been, that time, to see everything so clean about the light.  What the Inspector had said about Fedderson’s being stuck here in a second-class light—­best keeper on the coast.  And so on and so on, till either he or I had to go aloft and have a look at the wicks.

He’d been there twenty-three years, all told, and he’d got used to the feeling that he was kept down unfair—­so used to it, I guess, that he fed on it, and told himself how folks ashore would talk when he was dead and gone—­best keeper on the coast—­kept down unfair.  Not that he said that to me.  No, he was far too loyal and humble and respectful, doing his duty without complaint, as anybody could see.

And all that time, night after night, hardly ever a word out of the woman.  As I remember it, she seemed more like a piece of furniture than anything else—­not even a very good cook, nor over and above tidy.  One day, when he and I were trimming the lamp, he passed the remark that his first wife used to dust the lens and take a pride in it.  Not that he said a word against Anna, though.  He never said a word against any living mortal; he was too upright.

I don’t know how it came about; or, rather, I do know, but it was so sudden, and so far away from my thoughts, that it shocked me, like the world turned over.  It was at prayers.  That night I remember Fedderson was uncommon long-winded.  We’d had a batch of newspapers out by the tender, and at such times the old man always made a long watch of it, getting the world straightened out.  For one thing, the United States minister to Turkey was dead.  Well, from him and his soul, Fedderson got on to Turkey and the Presbyterian college there, and from that to heathen in general.  He rambled on and on, like the surf on the ledge, woom-woom-woom, never coming to an end.

You know how you’ll be at prayers sometimes.  My mind strayed.  I counted the canes in the chair-seat where I was kneeling; I plaited a corner of the table-cloth between my fingers for a spell, and by and by my eyes went wandering up the back of the chair.