“Don’t you believe this part of my story,” she suddenly asked, looking up into Mr. Ransom’s troubled face?  “Ask the policeman who tramps about those streets every night; he’ll tell you.”

The question on Ransom’s lips died.  What use of asking what she could not hear.

“I wish I knew what you were thinking,” she now murmured softly, so softly that he hardly caught the words.  “But I never shall, I never shall.  I will tell you now how I became deaf,” she promised after a moment of wistful gazing.  “Is there any one near?  Can anybody hear me?” she continued, with a suspicious look about her.

He shook his head.  It was the first movement he had made since she began her story.

This apparently reassured her, for she proceeded at once to say: 

“Mother Duda had never told me anything about herself.  It scared me then when one morning I found sitting at the breakfast table a man who she said was her son.  He was big and pale looking, and had a slight swelling on one side of his neck which made me sick; but I tried to be polite, though I did not like him at all and had a sudden feeling of having no home any more.  That was the first day.  The next two were worse.  For he didn’t hate me as I did him, and wouldn’t leave the house while I was there, saying he could not bear to be away from his mother.  But he skipped out quick enough after I was gone, so the neighbors said, and sometimes I think he followed me.  Mother Duda wasn’t like her old self at all.  She loved him, he was her son, but she didn’t like all he did.  She wanted him to work; he wouldn’t work.  He sat and stared at me as the gipsy king used to stare, and if I grew red and hot it was from shame and fear and horror of the great throat I saw growing from day to day, and which would some time be like his mother’s.  He knew I didn’t like him, but he wasn’t good like Mother Duda, and told me one day that he was going to make me his wife, whether I wanted him to or not, and talked about a great secret, and the big man he would be some day.  This made me angry, and I said that all the bigness he would ever have would be in his neck.  At which he struck me, right across the ear, hard, so hard that I fell on the floor with a scream, and Mother Duda came running.  He was sorry then and threw down the thing he had in his hand; but the harm had been done and I was sick a month and had doctors and awful pain, and when I was well again I couldn’t hear a sound with that ear.  Hans wasn’t there while I was ill; I shouldn’t have got well if he had been; but he came back when I was up again and was very meek though he didn’t stop looking at me.  I thought I would run away one day, and went out without my basket, but after I had tried two whole days to get work and couldn’t, I went back.  Mother Duda almost squeezed the heart out of me for joy, and Hans went down on his knees and promised not to do or say anything more that I didn’t like.  He even promised to go to work, but his