He turned off onto a side street and made his way back to the shop by a roundabout way, and when he got there he went straightaway and washed his hands and face. Then he went to his table and began to work as best he could, but he felt there were eyes all over the place appraising him as she had appraised him, and he could not stop thinking of himself and appraising himself as she had appraised him. Jack Minton came up from the workrooms to look for a bolt of gray tweed, and when he was passing Hubert’s table he stopped and looked at him and asked him if he was all right and if there was anything the matter. Hubert replied that everything was all right. Minton still hesitated by the table, looking down at him, but Hubert wouldn’t look up and at last, to make him go away, Hubert said that he’d had a bit of a shock, nothing worth talking about, and he did not talk about it.

Late in the afternoon Rose came in from the garden where she had been working and sat down in her low chair near the fireplace and took a piece of gray wool crochet from the old basket she kept always on the floor beside her. She had brought the basket from her mother’s the day she was married, and it had lasted as long as it had because it was too cumbersome for daily marketing and so she kept her work in it — her knitting and crocheting and the mending. She was making an afghan, square by square. As she worked, her lips moved, and every time she finished a row of stitches she lifted her head up as though she had suddenly come to a decision that had been difficult to reach but that was now pleasant to reach. From time to time she glanced appraisingly around the room and she watched the clock. The clock was mahogany, and it had been a wedding present from an old friend of Hubert’s, Frank Guiney, and it had a place of honor in the center of the mantelpiece. When she heard the boy leave the evening newspaper she got up and fetched the paper and sat down and began to read it, but when she heard Hubert’s key in the lock she quickly closed the paper and folded it to look as though it had not been opened at all.

Hubert hung his raincoat and his hat in the hall and went up to the bedroom and changed his coat for an old three-button cardigan of tan wool. When he got down into the back sitting room Rose was sitting in her chair working on her crochet.

“I put the paper in your chair,” she said.

“Is there anything in it?” he asked.

“No,” she said doubtfully. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe there is.”