Again that scourge of the spirit aroused Eva to her normal state.  She became a living, breathing, wrathful, loving woman once more.  “Don’t you dare say a word against Jim!” she cried out; “not one word, Fanny Brewster; I won’t hear it.  Don’t you dare say a word!”

“Don’t you say a word against my papa!” shrilled Amabel.  Then she left Ellen and ran to her mother, and clung to her.  And Eva caught her up, and hugged the little, fragile thing against her breast, and pounced upon her with kisses, with a fury as of rage instead of love.

“She always looked like Jim,” she sobbed out; “she always did.  Aggie Bemis shall never get her.  I’ve got her in spite of all the awful wrong of life; it’s the good that had to come out of it whether or no, and God couldn’t help Himself.  I’ve got this much.  She always looked like Jim.”

Eva set Amabel down and began leading her out of the room.

“You ain’t goin’?” said Fanny, who had herself begun to weep.  “Eva, you ain’t goin’?  Oh, you poor girl!”

“Don’t!—­you said that like Jim,” Eva cried, with a great groan of pain.

“Eva, you ain’t goin’?  Wait a little while, and let me do somethin’ for you.”

“You can’t do anything.  Come, Amabel.”

Eva and Amabel went away, the child rolling eyes of terror and interrogation at them, Eva impervious to all her sister’s pleading.

When Andrew heard what had happened, and Fanny repeated what Eva had said, his blame for Jim Tenny was unqualified.  “I’ve had a hard time enough, knocked about from pillar to post, and I know what she means when she talks about a checker-board.  God knows I feel myself sometimes as if I wasn’t anything but a checker-piece instead of a man,” he said, “but it’s all nonsense blamin’ the shoe-manufacturers for his runnin’ away with that woman.  A man has got to use what little freedom he’s got right.  It ain’t any excuse for Jim Tenny that he’s been out of work and got discouraged.  He’s a good-for-nothing cur, an’ I’d like to tell him so.”

“It won’t do for you to talk to Eva that way,” said Fanny.  They were all at the supper-table.  Ellen was listening silently.

“She does right to stand up for her husband, I suppose,” said Andrew, “but anybody’s got to use a little sense.  It don’t make it any better for Jim, tryin’ to shove blame off his shoulders that belongs there.  The manufacturers didn’t make him run off with another woman and leave his child.  That was a move he made himself.”

“But he wouldn’t have made that move if the manufacturers hadn’t made theirs,” Ellen said, unexpectedly.

“That’s so,” said Fanny.

Andrew looked uneasily at Ellen, in whose cheeks two red spots were burning, and whose eyes upon his face seemed narrowed to two points of brightness.  “There’s nothing for you to worry about, child,” he said.