Not another interchange of real feeling could he obtain with her until they knocked at her father’s door; and it was a sharp stab to him to think that this was actually the first time since their marriage that they had presented themselves together at this threshold.

Lobbie himself opened the door to them, and they found the whole family collected in the front-room. Mrs. Torp, having obviously finished making the beds and tidying up the kitchen, for she wore a dirty apron over her Sunday dress, had recently dropped into a chair opposite her husband, from which island of peace she had clearly been flinging abroad volleys of belligerent eloquence; for the plump shirt-sleeved monument-maker had a fixed expression upon his face, at once crushed and protesting⁠—an expression that remained visible even after the stir of their arrival.