Only his brother Reuben, dull, pious, affectionate Reuben, took to him, and showed that patient and wondering admiration of the younger's cleverness, which probably Sandy had reckoned on as his right from his parents also.
On the last evening of his stay--he had luckily been able to make his coming coincide with an Easter three days' holiday--he was sitting beside his mother in the dusk, thinking, with a relief which every now and then roused in him a pang of shame, that in fourteen or fifteen more hours he should be back in London, in the world which made much of him and knew what a smart fellow he was, when his mother opened her eyes--so wide and blue they looked in her pinched, death-stricken face--and looked at him full.
'Sandy!' 'Yes, mother!' he said, startled--for he had been sunk in his own thoughts--and laying his hand on hers.
'You should get a wife, Sandy.' 'Well, some day, mother, I suppose I shall,' he said, with a change of expression which the twilight concealed.
She was silent a minute, then she began again, slow and feebly, but with a strange clearness of articulation.
'If she's sick, Sandy, _doan't grudge it her._ Women 'ud die fasster iv they could.' The whole story of the slow consuming bitterness of years spoke through those fixed and filmy eyes.

Her son gave a sudden irrepressible sob.

There was a faint lightening in the little wrinkled face, and the lips made a movement.

He kissed her, and in that last moment of consciousness the mother almost forgave him his good clothes and his superior airs.
Poor Sandy! Looking to his after story, it seems strange that any one should ever have felt him unbearably prosperous.

About six months after his mother's death he married a milliner's assistant, whom he met first in the pit of a theatre, and whom he was already courting when his mother gave him the advice recorded.