Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside
his mother's bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. "She must
be asleep," he thought.

At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into
the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour woman
still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his mother's
bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little stand beside
the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a tall,
aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung upon the
wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a portrait
of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam and his
sister.

Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come
upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands
lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the
great lady who looked down at her.

"It is a fraud," he had declared, irritated by what he believed his
sister's devotion to one of the father's pretensions. "It is a fraud he
has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people
believe he is something big."

The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because
of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a spasm
of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the floor
with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon her knees
before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook with anger
and grief.