“‘Ashamed!  I ain’t ashamed.’

“‘You hear that, sister?  Now I hope you’re convinced.’

“‘’Twa’n’t nothin’ but lemonade I was drinkin’,’ I hollers, pretty nigh crazy.  ’She asked me to stop and have a glass ’cause ’twas so hot.  And as for callin’ on her, I wa’n’t.  I was just passin’ by, and she sings out what a dreadful night ’twas, and I said ’twas, too, and she says won’t I have somethin’ cold to drink.  That’s all there was to it.’

“Afore Emeline could answer, Bennie comes back at me again.

“‘Perhaps you’ll tell us this was the first time you have visited her,’ he purrs.

“Well, that was a sockdolager, ’cause twa’n’t the first time.  I don’t know how many times ’twas.  I never kept no account of ’em.  Too glad to get away from her everlastin’ tongue-clackin’.  But when ’twas put right up to me this way, I—­I declare I was all fussed up.  I felt sick and I guess I looked so.  Emeline was lookin’ at me and seemin’ly waitin’ for me to say somethin’; yet I couldn’t say it.  And Bennie D. laughed, quiet but wicked.

“That laugh fixed me.  I swung round and lit into him.

“‘You mind your own business,’ I roars.  ‘Ain’t you ashamed, makin’ trouble with a man’s wife in his own house?’

“‘I was under the impression the house belonged to my sister-in-law,’ he says.  And again I was knocked off my pins.

“‘You great big loafer!’ I yelled at him; ‘settin’ here doin’ nothin’ but raisin’ the divil generally!  I—­I—­’

“He jumped as if I’d stuck a brad-awl into him.  The shocked expression came across his face again, and he runs to Emeline and takes her arm.

“‘Sister, sister,’ he says, quick, but gentle, ’this is no place for you.  Language like that is . . . there! there! don’t you think you’d better leave the room?’

“She didn’t go.  As I remember it now, it keeps comin’ back to me that she didn’t go.  She just stood still and looked at me.  And then she says:  ‘Seth, why did you lie to me?’”

“‘I didn’t lie,’ I shouts.  ’I forgot, I tell you.  I never thought that windmill of a Christy woman was enough importance to remember.  I didn’t lie to you—­I never did.  Oh, Emeline, you know I didn’t.  What’s the matter with you and me, anyway?  We used to be all right and now we’re all wrong.’

“‘One of us is,’ says Bennie D. That was the final straw that choked the camel.

“‘Yes,’ I says to him, ’that’s right, one of us is, and I don’t know which.  But I know this:  you and I can’t stay together in this house any longer.’

“I can see that room now, as ‘twas when I said that.  Us three lookin’ at each other, and the clock a-tickin’, and everything else still as still.  I choked, but I kept on.

“‘I mean it,’ I says.  ‘Either you clear out of this house or I do.’

“And, while the words was on my lips, again it came to me strong that it wa’n’t really my house at all.  I turned to my wife.