“What’s he been doin’ that he’s up against it like this?” she asked, ignoring the compliment.

“Trying to forget a wife who went back on him—­ so he tells me.”

“Has he done it?”

“Yes.  If you can believe him.  She has become a drunkard.”

“Well—­that’s about the worst thing can happen to a man—­if he’s telling ye the truth.  What’s become of her?”

“He did not say.  All I know is that he has not seen her since she went away.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to,” she flashed back.  “Did ye get out of him whose fault it was?”

Felix, whose remarks had been addressed to the red-hot coals in the stove, glanced quickly toward Kitty, but made no answer.

“Ye don’t know, that’s it, and so ye don’t say I’ll tell ye that it’s the man’s fault more’n half the time.”

“And what makes you think so, Mistress Kitty?” he asked, trying to speak casually, not daring to look at her for fear she would detect the tremor on his lips, wondering all the time at her interest in the subject.

“It ain’t for thinkin’, Mr. O’Day, it’s just seein’ what goes on every day, and it sets me crazy.  If a man’s got gumption enough to make a girl love him well enough to marry him, he ought to know enough to keep it goin’ night and day—­if he don’t want her to forget him.  Half of ’em—­poor souls!—­are as ignorant as unborn babes, and don’t know any more what’s comin’ to them than a chicken before its head’s cut off.  She wakes up some mornin’ after they’ve been married a year or two and finds her man’s gone to work without kissin’ her good-by—­when he was nigh crazy before they were married if he didn’t get one every ten minutes.  The next thing he does is to stay out half the night, and when she is nigh frightened to death, and tells him so with her eyes streamin’, instead of comfortin’ her, he tells her she ought to have better sense, and why didn’t she go to sleep and not worry, that he was of age and could take care of himself—­when all the time she is only lovin’ him and pretty near out of her mind lest he gets hurted.  And last he gets to lyin’ as to where he has been—­maybe it’s the lodge, or a game in a back room, or somethin’ ye can’t talk about—­anyhow, he lies about it, and then she finds it out, and everything comes tumblin’ down together, and the pieces are all over the floor.  That runs on for a while, and pretty soon in comes a dandy-lookin’ chap and tells her she’s an abused woman—­and she has been—­and he begins pickin’ up the scraps and piecin’ them together, tellin’ her all the time the pretty things the first man told her and which, fool-like, she believes over agin, and then one fine day she skips off and the husband goes round, tearin’ his hair with shame or shakin’ his fist with rage, and says she broke up his home, and if she ever sets foot on his doorstep again he’ll set the dogs on her, or let her starve before he’d give her a crumb.  Don’t it make you laugh?  It does me.  And you should see ’em swell round and air their troubles when most everybody knows just what’s happened from the beginnin’!  If it was any of my business, I’d let out and tell ’em so.