Mrs. Barry's farm-house stood a little back from the river. A stream that widened to a pond, and narrowed again to a stream, divided the house from the fields that ran between it and the river; the decent thatched roofs and whitewashed walls of the farm, and the elm trees that grew beside it, were mirrored in the pond. A flotilla of geese and ducks paraded, in stately fatuity, to and fro across the mirror. A battered little wooden bridge, painted green, enabled the people of the farm to reach the banks of the river. Christian crossed it, and went up to the open door of the house.
In the kitchen a red-haired woman was seated, rocking a wooden cradle with her foot while she stitched at a child's frock. Hens, with their alert and affected reserve of manner, stepped in and out of the doorway, sometimes slowly, with poised claw, sometimes headlong, with greedy speed. Christian watched them and the hound puppies (in whose power of resistance to temptation she had no confidence), while she talked to the woman of the house, and heard the story of her trouble.
Her husband had been "above in the hospital at Riverstown. He was in it with a fortnight," said the red-haired woman in the idiom of her district, the noise of the rocker of the cradle on the earthen floor beating through her words; "he had a bunch, like, undher his chin, and they were to cut it." She paused, and the wooden bump of the cradle filled the pause.
"When they had it cut, he rose up on the table, and all his blood went from him; only one little tint, I suppose, stopped in him. Afther a while, the nurse seen the life creeping back in him. 'We have him yet!' says she to the Docthor. 'I thought he was gone from us!' says the Docthor." The voice ceased again. The speaker slashed the frock in her hand at an over-bold hen, who had skipped on to the table beside her and was pecking hard and sharp at some food on a plate.
"They sent him home then. We thought he was cured entirely. He pulled out the summer, but he had that langersome way with him through all."
She was silent a moment, then she looked at Christian, with grief, crowned and omnipotent, on her tragic brow.
"As long as he was alive, I had courage in spite of all, but when I thinks now of them days, and the courage I had, it goes through me!" Her red-brown eyes stared through the open door at the path twisting across the field to the high road.