II
It was with an effort that Mrs. Reinhart at length closed the window and took up the forgotten sewing which had slipped on to the floor. How behindhand she was! A skirt had to be finished that night. Without a pause the long monotonous hours of the afternoon passed until it was time to rekindle the bit of fire and grope about for a candle-end.
The scrap of supper was soon eaten, and then, while the fragments still strewed the table, she found her gaze wandering round from one familiar object to another. It was strange how to-night the room—the scene of her last fourteen or fifteen years labour— stood bared to the flickering eye of the solitary candle. There was the little bed, with its faded grey shawl for a covering, on which she had tossed those years of lonely nights; there, the faded velvet sofa, once the pride of the young married couple's parlour, on which she had lain weak, but ridiculously happy, in those long summer days following the birth of her child. Now, in the rare moments in which she threw herself upon the couch, it was when she returned at night, too faint and worn out to eat, after ten or eleven hours sewing. There was little else in the room: nothing but the gamboge-coloured tin box, artlessly painted to simulate grained wood, which contained some poor clothing and the gimcrack rosewood whatnot, relic of the triumphs of early married gentility, and on which still stood a dusty ornament off a wedding-cake and a cheap desk, the receptacle of all her treasures. She had not opened it for a week or two, she remembered, and wondered what she had done with the key.
Of course. It was in the crock on the mantelpiece. And in a moment she was fitting it, with trembling fingers, into the lock.
