shouted the
incensed husband.

"What are you mumbling?"

"I sa--sa--said, let's hope--you'll go first," sobbed his wife. "Then
it will be all right."

Mr. Gribble opened his mouth, and then, realizing the inadequacy of the
English language for moments of stress, closed it again. He broke his
silence at last in favour of Uncle George.

"Mind you," he said, concluding a peroration which his wife listened to
with her fingers in her ears--"mind you, I reckon I've been absolutely
done by you and your precious Uncle George. I've given up a good
situation, and now, any time you fancy to go off the hooks, I'm to be
turned into the street."

"I'll try and live, for your sake, Henry," said his wife.

"Think of my worry every time you are ill," pursued the indignant Mr.
Gribble.

Mrs. Gribble sighed, and her husband, after a few further remarks
concerning Uncle George, his past and his future, announced his
intention of going to the lawyers and seeing whether anything could be
done. He came back in a state of voiceless gloom, and spent the rest of
a beautiful day indoors, smoking a pipe which had lost much of its
flavour, and regarding with a critical and anxious eye the small, weedy
figure of his wife as she went about her work.

The second month's payment went into his pocket as a matter of course,
but on this occasion Mrs. Gribble made no requests for new clothes or
change of residence. A little nervous cough was her sole comment.

"Got a cold?" inquired her husband, starting.

"I don't think so," replied his wife, and, surprised and touched at this
unusual display of interest, coughed again.

"Is it your throat or your chest?" he inquired, gruffly.

Mrs. Gribble coughed again to see. After five coughs she said she
thought it was her chest.

"You'd better not go out o' doors to-day, then," said Mr. Gribble.
"Don't stand about in draughts; and I'll fetch you in a bottle of cough
mixture when I go out. What about a lay-down on the sofa?"

His wife thanked him, and, reaching the sofa, watched with half-closed
eyes as he cleared the breakfast-table. It was the first time he had
done such a thing in his life, and a little honest pride in the
possession of such a cough would not be denied. Dim possibilities of
its vast usefulness suddenly occurred to her.

She took the cough mixture for a week, by which time other symptoms,
extremely disquieting to an ease-loving man, had manifested themselves.
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