“You holler and ask him.”

“What is the use?  Just see the way he walks; I know without askin’.”

However, as Andrew neared his house he involuntarily quickened his pace, and his head and shoulders became suddenly alert.  It had occurred to him that possibly Fanny and Eva might have had some news of Ellen during his absence.  Possibly she might have come home even.

Then he was hailed by the stout woman standing at the door of the next house.  “Heard anything yet, Andrew?”

Andrew shook his head, and looked with despairing eyes at the windows where he used to see Ellen’s little face.  She had not come, then, for these women would have known it.  He entered the house, and Fanny greeted him with a tremulous cry.  “Have you heard anything; oh, have you heard anything, Andrew?”

Eva sprang forward and clutched him by the arm.

“Have you?”

[Illustration:  Eva sprang forward and clutched him by the arm]

Andrew shook his head, and moved her hand from his arm, and pushed past her roughly.

Fanny stood in his way, and threw her arms around him with a wild, sobbing cry, but he pushed her away also with sternness, and went to the kitchen sink to wash his hands.  The four women—­his wife, her sister, and the two neighbors—­stood staring at him; his face was terrible as he dipped the water from the pail on the sink corner, and the terribleness of it was accentuated by the homely and every-day nature of his action.

They all stared, then Fanny burst out with a loud and desperate wail.  “He won’t speak to me, he pushes me away, when it is our child that’s lost—­his as well as mine.  He hasn’t any feelings for me that bore her.  He only thinks of himself.  Oh, oh, my own husband pushes me away.”

Andrew went on washing his hands and his ghastly face, and made no reply.  He had actually at that moment not the slightest sympathy with his wife.  All his other outlets of affection were choked by his concern for his lost child; and as for pity, he kept reflecting, with a cold cruelty, that it served her right—­it served both her and her sister right.  Had not they driven the child away between them?

He would not eat the supper which the neighbors had prepared for him; finally he went across the yard to his mother’s.  It seemed to him at that time that his mother could enter into his state of mind better than any one else.

When he went out, Fanny called after him, frantically, “Oh, Andrew, you ain’t going to leave me?”

When he made no response, she gazed for a second at his retreating back, then her temper came to her aid.  She caught her sister’s arm, and pulled her away out of the kitchen.  “Come with me,” she said, hoarsely.  “I’ve got nobody but you.  My own husband leaves me when he is in such awful trouble, and goes to that old woman, that has always hated me, for comfort.”