“Oh, very well!  And I shall be in to-morrow night; won’t that do?  A man can’t be always tied up to the kitchen table, you know.  Besides, I promised Dicky Vendo I’d go; his wife’s away, and he’s free.”

“Yours isn’t away.”

“But she’s been a damned little shrew, and doesn’t deserve me to stay in for her.  There! that’s what you get by arguing.”  He laughed a laugh of vexation as much at his own ill-temper as at her pertinacity.

“Very well,” she said, drawing back.

The light in the room was subdued, for the candles had not yet given place to the incandescent glare.  He cast a glance at her face, but she had withdrawn to the shadow.

“Well,” he hesitated, “night-night, in case you don’t sit up.”

“Good night,” she replied.  “I shan’t sit up.”

“You might make up the fire before you go to bed, though, there’s a dear girl.”

She did not answer, and he went out; she followed him to the doorway, and stood there watching him put on his overcoat and muffler again.  His pipe was between his teeth; he removed it for a second to kiss her cheek hastily, then restored it.  With a hysterical anger held feverishly in check, she thought that male imperturbability, male selfishness, were incredible.

“Night-night!” he said again, going out.  “I’ll bring you a programme.”

The door shut.  She was alone.  She advanced passionately upon the strewn dinner-table; it waited there to be cleared by the work of her hands, as imperturbable as he.

She dashed off the candle-shades first.

“What a day!” she gasped.

Early morning and the awakening in the cold, the brushing of grates and the lighting of fires, the sweeping and cooking, to get a man off warmed and comfortable to business; the long, long hours of silence and domestic tasks, waiting for his return; his return to his food; his departure again; a desolate evening of silence and domestic tasks—­these were that span of hope and promise called a day.

Married life!

CHAPTER XIII

“THE VERY DEVIL”

When spring had passed, and part of the summer, the Osborn Kerrs did as all their neighbours did; they packed up their best clothes, folded the baby’s cot, swathed the ten-guinea perambulator, and with the baby and his cumbersome impedimenta, made an exhausting effort and went to the sea.

They did not go to the sea altogether lightly; it had cost a great deal of thought and arithmetic and discussion as to a stopping-place.  Osborn was keen on a boarding-house; he knew a jolly one where he had stayed before, but Marie vetoed that.  They wouldn’t have babies in boarding-houses; they wouldn’t like her keeping the perambulator there, and wheeling it through the hall; likewise they wouldn’t like her intruding into the back regions with it.  She knew that what one did with a young family was to take rooms, and cater for oneself.  So they wrote to engage rooms, and after much correspondence found what would suit their purse, and started for a week by the sea.