turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels rose a
voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had begun to
rain.

"He has got into the wrong street," thought the boy stupidly.

Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs
echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air
of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother's ironing board stood
against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering
in Sam's heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store
doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of his
father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate's wedding, when Windy
had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and the
mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house, sick
with humiliation.

The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores
replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy's anger. Sam began thinking
again of his mother's life.

The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now
seemed utterly fruitless. "I would like to repay him," he thought, shaken
with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The
cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages on
the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol of
the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he turned
his face and stared at the wall.

He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith's house. Freedom