l, save one, his
death was but as though he had moved a little farther into the kitchen.

It seemed almost strange that even his wife should miss him. One had
thought so little of them as man and wife. One could hardly, even by
process of thinking, realise that between these rinded and wrinkled
beings love had once hung like a rosy cloud, from which one day had
sprung Jenny.

On one or two occasions, indeed, they had been surprised in an uncanny
semblance of a caress, and once in a while an almost supernatural
retrospect had lit up and vanished again in an unaccustomed tender word;
and to have been present then was to feel somehow frightened.

Ah! the gay young leaves no longer kiss across in the morning sun, but
the stern old trees have meetings you know not of far beneath the
ground. Their roots are twisted and twined in a wonderful embrace there;
there in the dark they are very close together, and shall not be
wrenched apart without groanings that cannot be uttered.

Jenny can hardly be said to have missed her father, except through her
mother, who seemed suddenly to grow a little deafer, a little more
dim-sighted, just a trifle less brisk and busy than before, and with a
touch about her of that old-age awesomeness that mutters to itself in
corners and seems to know strange things.

Yes, Jane missed her John. Her old heart knew that he was no longer
sitting in the kitchen.

CHAPTER XV

JENNY'S BOTTOM DRAWER

Jenny and her old mother began to grow closer to each other at this
time. Perhaps it was because the old woman felt lonelier, and perhaps,
too, because the loss of her old man had sent her thoughts wandering
among the enchanted fields of her young days, that she began to talk
sometimes to Jenny about her marriage, and to give her quaint advice on
the subject of "managing" husbands; "as if," Jenny smilingly said to
herself, "an old man like father was the same, belonged even to the same
race, as Theophil."

Perhaps Mrs. Talbot scented some such reflection in Jenny's expression;
at all events, she answered it with an "Eh, but all men are alike, my
dear, under their skins,--all alike, and they need humouring and
managing just in the same way, prince or peasant."

The idea of "managing" Theophil had something repulsive in it for Jenny;
there was an element of deceit, of cunning, implied which didn't go with
her ideas of true love and the life beautiful of which she was dreaming.
She didn't believ