Terry Sullivan had been no good
husband to her. Beating her and the lesser Sullivans had been his
serious aim when in liquor and his diversion when out. But he fell from
a gracious scaffolding with a. bucket of azure paint one day and
fractured his stout neck, a thing which in the general opinion of Little
Arcady Heaven had meant to be consummated under more formal auspices.

But when they took Terry home and laid him on her bed, she had wailed
absurdly for the lost lover in him. Through the night her cry had been,
"Ah, Terry, Terry,--ye gev me manny a haird blow, darlin', but ye kep'
th' hairdest til th' last!"

It was not possible to avoid being irritated a little by such a woman,
but I always tried to conceal this from her. I suppose she had a right
to her own play-world. She was dressed now in a limp black of many rusty
ruffles that sagged close to her and glistened in spots through its
rust. Both the dress and the spiritless silk bonnet that circled her
keen little face seemed to have been cried over a long time--to be
always damp with her tears.

With parting injunctions to my namesake to let the cat alone, not to
"track up" the kitchen, and not to play with matches, the little woman
lovingly cuffed the conspiring lesser Sullivans into a decorous line
behind her and marched them off to church. There, I knew, she would give
from her poor wage that the soul of dead Terry should be the sooner
prayed out of a place, which, it would seem, might have been created
with an eye single to his just needs.

Thinking of woman's love,--that, like the peace of God it passeth all
understanding,--I officiated absently as one of two guests at a
"tea-party." My fellow-guest was a large doll braced stiffly in its
chair; a doll whose waxen face had been gouged by vandal nails. That was
an old tragedy, though a sickening one at the time. The doll had been my
Christmas offering to the woman child, and in the dusk of that joyous
day my namesake had craved of its proud mother the boon of holding it a
little while. Relinquished trustingly to him, he had sat with it by a
cheerful fire--without evil intent, I do truly believe. Surely it was
by chance that he found its waxen face softening under the stove's
glow--and has Heaven affixed nails to any boy of seven that, in a dusky
room at a quiet moment, would have behaved with more restraint? I trow
not. One surprised dig and all was lost. Of that fair surface of rounded
cheek, fattened ch