THE STEADFAST HEART
far, for he abandoned his joviality suddenly and threw the little box to his wife.
“There,” he said with a snarl, “it’s the last you git outa me, so make the most of it.”
Mrs. Burke clutched her treasure from the floor and scuttled back to the mattress. Sitting on its edge, she turned her body to conceal her hands from her menfolk, broke off particles of blackish brown and dropped them into her cup, stirring them with her spoon until they partially dissolved…. Open she had been in her demands for the drug, brazen in her pleadings, yet, at the consummation of her desires, she still maintained a fiction that she took the drug surreptitiously. Some faint spark must have remained aglow within her. Still with her back to the room, she swallowed the mass and turned her face to the wall.
Angus Burke and his father ate their meal in silence.
After he had wiped the grease from the spider with a succession of slices of bread, Titus pushed back his chair and tilted it against the wall. His appetite was satisfied, for he was not dainty, and his long walk from Rainbow had dissipated the more disagreeable of the effects of his liquor. He was inclined to be genial after the peculiar fashion of Titus Burke.
He grinned at Angus with a tincture of malice
5
