ed at five o'clock. But for months he would stop and drink
every night on his way from work.

In the winter nights, when it was cold, and grew dark early, Mrs. Morel
would put a brass candlestick on the table, light a tallow candle to
save the gas. The children finished their bread-and-butter, or dripping,
and were ready to go out to play. But if Morel had not come they
faltered. The sense of his sitting in all his pit-dirt, drinking, after
a long day's work, not coming home and eating and washing, but sitting,
getting drunk, on an empty stomach, made Mrs. Morel unable to bear
herself. From her the feeling was transmitted to the other children. She
never suffered alone any more: the children suffered with her.

Paul went out to play with the rest. Down in the great trough of
twilight, tiny clusters of lights burned where the pits were. A few last
colliers straggled up the dim field path. The lamplighter came along. No
more colliers came. Darkness shut down over the valley; work was done.
It was night.

Then Paul ran anxiously into the kitchen. The one candle still burned on
the table, the big fire glowed red. Mrs. Morel sat alone. On the hob
the saucepan steamed; the dinner-plate lay waiting on the table. All
the room was full of the sense of waiting, waiting for the man who was
sitting in his pit-dirt, dinnerless, some mile away from home, across
the darkness, drinking himself drunk. Paul stood in the doorway.

"Has my dad come?" he asked.

"You can see he hasn't," said Mrs. Morel, cross with the futility of the
question.

Then the boy dawdled about near his mother. They shared the same
anxiety. Presently Mrs. Morel went out and strained the potatoes.

"They're ruined and black," she said; "but what do I care?"

Not many words were spoken. Paul almost hated his mother for suffering
because his father did not come home from work.

"What do you bother yourself for?" he said. "If he wants to stop and get
drunk, why don't you let him?"

"Let him!" flashed Mrs. Morel. "You may well say 'let him'."

She knew that the man who stops on the way home from work is on a quick
way to ruining himself and his home. The children were yet young, and
depended on the breadwinner. William gave her the sense of relief,
providing her at last with someone to turn to if Morel failed. But the
tense atmosphere of the room on these waiting evenings was the same.

The minutes ticked away. At six o'clock still the cloth lay on the
ta