unlovely, with a hard eye and a temper as stubborn as one of St.
Nicholas's horns. How she had picked up with a man was a mystery,
until you looked at _him_.

After six years of wedlock they quarrelled one day, about nothing at
all: at least, Simon Hancock, though unable to state the exact cause
of strife, felt himself ready to swear it was nothing more serious
than the cooking of the day's dinner. From that date, however, the
pair lived in the house together and never spoke. The man happened
to be of the home-keeping sort--possessed no friends and never put
foot inside a public-house. Through the long evenings he would sit
beside his own fender, with his wife facing him, and never a word
flung across the space between them, only now and then a look of cold
hate. The few that saw them thus said it was like looking on a pair
of ugly statues. And this lasted for four years.

Of course the matter came to their minister's ears--he was a
"Brianite"--and the minister spoke to them after prayer-meeting, one
Wednesday night, and called at the cottage early next morning, to
reconcile them. He stayed fifteen minutes and came away, down the
street, with a look on his face such as Moses might have worn on his
way down from Mount Sinai, if only Moses had seen the devil there,
instead of God.


At the end of four years, the neighbours remarked that for two days
no smoke had issued from the chimney of this cottage, nor had anyone
seen the front door opened. There grew a surmise that the quarrel
had flared out at last, and the wedded pair were lying within, in
their blood. The anticipated excitement of finding the bodies was