“What’s he look like?”

“Don’t know.  Never saw him.  He’s at sea all the time.  But I know how tall he is.  Mom says I’m goin’ to be bigger’n him, and he was five feet eleven.  There’s a picture of him in the album.  His face is thin, and he has whiskers.”

A great illumination came to Josiah.  He was himself five feet eleven.  He had worn whiskers, and his face had been thin in those days.  And Johnnie had said his father’s name was Josiah Childs.  He, Josiah, was this model husband who neither smoked, swore, nor drank.  He was this seafaring man whose memory had been so carefully shielded by Agatha’s forgiving fiction.  He warmed toward her.  She must have changed mightily since he left.  He glowed with penitence.  Then his heart sank as he thought of trying to live up to this reputation Agatha had made for him.  This boy with the trusting blue eyes would expect it of him.  Well, he’d have to do it.  Agatha had been almighty square with him.  He hadn’t thought she had it in her.

The resolve he might there and then have taken was doomed never to be, for he heard the kitchen door open to give vent to a woman’s nagging, irritable voice.

“Johnnie!—­you!” it cried.

How often had he heard it in the old days:  “Josiah!—­you!” A shiver went through him.  Involuntarily, automatically, with a guilty start, he turned his hand back upward so that the cigar was hidden.  He felt himself shrinking and shrivelling as she stepped out on the stoop.  It was his unchanged wife, the same shrew wrinkles, with the same sour-drooping corners to the thin-lipped mouth.  But there was more sourness, an added droop, the lips were thinner, and the shrew wrinkles were deeper.  She swept Josiah with a hostile, withering stare.

“Do you think your father would stop work to talk to tramps?” she demanded of the boy, who visibly quailed, even as Josiah.

“I was only answering his questions,” Johnnie pleaded doggedly but hopelessly.  “He wanted to know—­”

“And I suppose you told him,” she snapped.  “What business is it of his prying around?  No, and he gets nothing to eat.  As for you, get to work at once.  I’ll teach you, idling at your chores.  Your father wa’n’t like that.  Can’t I ever make you like him?”

Johnnie bent his back, and the bucksaw resumed its protesting skreek.  Agatha surveyed Josiah sourly.  It was patent she did not recognise him.

“You be off,” she commanded harshly.  “None of your snooping around here.”

Josiah felt the numbness of paralysis creeping over him.  He moistened his lips and tried to say something, but found himself bereft of speech.

“You be off, I say,” she rasped in her high-keyed voice, “or I’ll put the constable after you.”