He went out to the stairhead, slamming the bedroom door behind him, threw up the sash of a window on the landing, and shouted into the darkness:
A fierce altercation followed, in which Dan's voice was harsh and coarse, and Bessie's shrill with anger.
"Then find your bed where you've found your company," shouted Dan. And shutting down the window with a crash he returned to the bedroom.
The mother heard Bessie going off, and the fading sound of the girl's footsteps tore her terribly. But after a few minutes more Dan was making noise in his nostrils again and she got up and crept downstairs to the kitchen (where the dull red of the dying turf left just enough light to see by), slid the bolts back noiselessly, opened the door and called in a whisper:
No answer came back to her, so she stepped out to the end of the cobbled way, barefooted and in her nightdress and nightcap, and called again:
Still there was no reply; so she returned to the kitchen, leaving the door on the latch, and sat for a long hour in a rocking chair by the hearth (souvenir of the days when Bessie was a child, and she had rocked her to sleep in it), fighting, in the misery of her heart, with the black thought which Dan had put there.
At length she remembered Susie and persuaded herself that Bessie must have gone to the Ginger Hall to sleep.
Being comforted by this thought, and feeling cold, for the fire had gone out, she crept upstairs. It was hard to go by Bessie's room on the landing. Every night for years she had stopped there on her way to bed. And in the winter, when the wind in the trees in the glen made a roar like the sea, she had called through the closed door: "Art thou warm enough, Bessie, or will I bring thee my flannel petticoat?" And now the door was open and the room was empty!
Dan was still asleep when she got back to the bedroom and her approach did not awaken him, so she fumbled her way to the bed (knowing where she was when her feet touched the warm sheepskin that lay by the side of it) and then opened the clothes and crept in.
The cold air she brought with her awakened Dan, and he turned on the pillow and said,
"You've not been letting in that girl of yours, have you?"
Dan made a grunt of satisfaction, and then said, with his face to the wall,