"
"Why don't she go into one of them institutions?" I asked, "There's plenty
of places where good work is being done by ugly, large-hearted women,
looking after natural childer, or nursing rich folk, and so on. Then she'd
be helping the world along and forget herself and lay up treasure where
moth and rust don't corrupt."
"You ax her," answered Arthur. "You give her a hint. I'd pay good money to
man or woman who could tempt her away from looking after me. And if she
thought I was minded to take another wife, I'd get the ugly edge of her
tongue up home to my vitals, so us must watch out."
"Don't you let her in the secret, however," I prayed the man, "because if
she knew she'd spoil all."
"Fear nothing," he answered; "I can take her measure."
But unfortunately for all concerned, Arthur over-praised himself in that
matter, and before a fortnight was told, while we developed our little
affair very clever, and I smiled on Arthur in the street afore neighbours,
and now and again he invited himself to tea--if Minnie didn't dash in and
put the lid on! What I felt I can't write down in any case now, things
happening as they did after; but at the time, I'd have wrung the woman's
neck for a ha'porth of peas. But she thought she knew the circumstances,
and being filled with hateful rage that her father was thinking on
another, she struck in the only quarter that mattered and, before I knowed
it, I was a lone woman and hope dead.
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