- ing-chair, his legs stretched out before him, taking
his ease at his own hearth. When he had come home at midnight, Nora, who always sat up for him, had insisted upon brewing him a cup of tea, under the impression, common to a certain class of women, that it has great medicinal qualities. Malachi had sipped it obediently, though he had not cared for it after all the mineral waters he had drunk that day, and had enjoyed far more than the tea the freckled Irish face of his daughter, as he gravely goggled at her over the rim of the saucer into which he had poured the beverage to cool it. They were in what Malachi called the parlor of their flat, though Nora had lately taken to calling it the drawing-room. It was furnished mostly in pieces upholstered in plush. Over the mantelpiece hung a large crayon portrait of a woman whose face, despite the insipidity the canvasing artist had given it, still showed the toil she had endured, if it told little of her strong character, while that disregard for expense which was expressed in the gilt frame marked it as a memorial of the dead. It was, of course, the face of Malachi's wife, and when Nora, in her new culture, had hinted at hanging it in his bedroom, she had, for the first
