Chapter 2 - Page 2

have,
and so there was an end of it. Ah, catch them taking a straight road.
But to put on those airs of helplessness, to wave him that gay good-by,
and then the moment his back was turned, to be off through the air
on--perhaps on her muff, to the home he had thought to lure her from. In
a word, to be diddled by a girl when one flatters himself he is
diddling! S'death, a dashing fellow finds it hard to bear. Nevertheless,
he has to bear it, for oh, Tommy, Tommy, 'tis the common lot of man.

His hand sought his pocket for the penny that had brought him comfort in
dark hours before now; but, alack, she had deprived him even of it.
Never again should his pinkie finger go through that warm hole, and at
the thought a sense of his forlornness choked him and he cried. You may
pity him a little now.

Darkness came and hid him even from himself. He is not found again until
a time of the night that is not marked on ornamental clocks, but has an
hour to itself on the watch which a hundred thousand or so of London
women carry in their breasts; the hour when men steal homewards
trickling at the mouth and drawing back from their own shadows to the
wives they once went a-maying with, or the mothers who had such travail
at the bearing of them, as if for great ends. Out of this, the
drunkard's hour, rose the wan face of Tommy, who had waked up somewhere
clammy cold and quaking, and he was a very little boy, so he ran to his
mother.

Such a shabby dark room it was, but it was home, such a weary worn woman
in the bed, but he was her son, and she had been wringing her hands
because he was so long in coming, and do you think he hurt her when he
pressed his head on her poor breast, and do you think she grudged the
heat his cold hands drew from her warm face? He squeezed her with a
violence that put more heat into her blood than he took out of it.

And he was very considerate, too: not a word of reproach in him, though
he knew very well what that bundle in the back of the bed was.

She guessed that he had heard the news and stayed away through jealousy
of his sister, and by and by she said, with a faint smile, "I have a
present for you, laddie." In the great world without, she used few
Thrums words now; you would have known she was Scotch by her accent
only, but when she and Tommy were together in that room, with the door
shut, she always spoke as if her window still looked out on the bonny
Marywellbrae. It is not really bonny, it is gey an' mean an' bleak, and
you must not come to see it. It is just a steep wind-swept street, old
and wrinkled, like your mother's face.

She had a present for him, she said, and Tommy replied, "I knows," with
averted face.

"Such a bonny