There Laura would sit by the fire and play Ludo with Tommy, with Snowball, the white cat, on her knee, while Mrs. Macey, on the other side of the hearth, stitched away at her sewing. She did not talk much, but she would sometimes look up and her eyes would smile a welcome. She seldom smiled with her lips and scarcely ever laughed and, because of this, some villagers called her “sour-looking.” “A sour-looking creature,” they said, but any one with more penetration would have known that she was not sour, but sad. “Ah! you’re young!” she once said when Laura had been talking a lot, “You’ve got all your life before you!” as though her own life was over, although she was not much over thirty.

Her Tommy was a quiet, thoughtful little lad with the man-of-the-house air of responsibility sometimes worn by fatherless only sons. He liked to wind up the clock, let out the cat, and lock the house door at night. Once when he had brought home a blouse which Mrs. Macey had been making out of an old muslin frock for Laura and with it the bill, for some now incredibly small amount—a shilling at the most, probably ninepence—Laura, by way of a mild joke, handed him her pencil and said, “Perhaps you’ll give me a receipt for the money?” “With pleasure,” he said in his best grown-up manner. “But it’s really not necessary. We shan’t charge you for it again.” Laura smiled at that “we”, denoting a partnership in which the junior partner was so very immature, then felt sad as she thought of the two of them, entrenched in that narrow home against the world with some mysterious background which could be felt but not fathomed.

Whatever the nature of the mystery surrounding the father, the boy knew nothing about it, for twice in Laura’s presence he asked his mother, “When will our Daddy come home?” and his mother, after a long pause, replied: “Oh, not for a long time yet. He’s travelling abroad, you know, and his gentleman’s not ready to come home.” The first time she added, “I expect they’re shooting tigers,” and the next, “It’s a long way to Spain.”

Once Tommy, in all innocence, brought out and showed Laura his father’s photograph. It was that of a handsome, flashy-looking man posing before the rustic-work background of a photographer’s studio. A top-hat and gloves were carefully arranged on a little table beside him. Not a working man, evidently, and yet he did not look quite like a gentleman, thought Laura, but it was no business of hers, and when she saw Mrs. Macey’s pained look as she took away the photograph she was glad that she had barely glanced at it.