Though she had said she was not going to wash the dishes he heard her scrape the skillet and a moment later, knock the coffee pot on the sink outside the kitchen door, and he called to upbraid her for breaking her promise to him. Under his admonitions she hastened through her work, and when she joined him in the sitting room she glanced at his feet, as she entered, to reassure herself by finding him still in slippers. He gave her a pang of fear by observing, in the moment when their conversation lagged, that he supposed he ought to go over and see Emily, but she said, appealing to his affection by speaking of herself in the third person:
"Oh, stay with mother to-night; it's been so long since you were at home."
She got out her sewing basket for her never idle hands and as Garwood stretched himself in the wooden rocking-chair his father had loved, he said:
"Oh, well, all right; she doesn't know I'm here anyhow."
Then she was content to sit and darn his socks and look at him in the great silence of a mother's love.
They sat there for a long time. She did not know how to make conversation, and, remembering the dislike for questions he had inherited from his silent father, she feared to disturb him by asking any. She was satisfied to have him with her.
Garwood remained silent until he had finished his cigar, disliking to interrupt his own pleasure in it by opening the subject that then was on his heart. But at length he began to talk to her about his campaign, and it was a stimulant to her pride to hear his confidences. She was more pleased than distressed when he spoke in a discouraged tone of his prospects. She knew he was of a desponding temperament, another heritage from his father, and it pleased her to try to cheer him.
"Oh, you'll be 'lected," she insisted. "Your mother's prayin', my son, and she has faith in her prayers."
Garwood laughed, with a touch of the harsh skepticism she was always combating in him.
"I'm afraid we need money just now, as much as prayers," he said.
"Money?" she asked, pausing in her darning, and looking up at him inquiringly.
"Yes," he said. "There are legitimate expenses in a campaign you know, that a candidate has to meet." And then he told her what the legitimate expenses were.