Mr. Mulready spoke genially and kindly, and Ned began
to hope that things would not be so bad after all.
The next morning, to his surprise, his mother appeared at breakfast,
a thing which he could not remember that she had ever done before,
and yet the hour was an early one, as her husband wanted to be off
to the mill. During the meal Mr. Mulready spoke sharply two or three
times, and it seemed to Ned that his mother was nervously anxious
to please him.
"Things are not going on so well after all," he said to himself as
he walked with his brother to school. "Mother has changed already;
I can see that she isn't a bit like herself. There she was fussing
over whether he had enough sugar with his tea, and whether the
kidneys were done enough for him; then her coming down to breakfast
was wonderful. I expect she has found already that somebody else's
will besides her own has got to be consulted; it's pretty soon for
her to have begun to learn the lesson."
It was very soon manifest that Mr. Mulready was master in his own
house. He still looked pleasant and smiled, for his smile was a
habitual one; but there was a sharpness in the ring of his voice,
an impatience if everything was not exactly as he wished. He roughly
silenced Charlie and Lucy if they spoke when he was reading his
paper at breakfast, and he spoke snappishly to his wife when she
asked him a question on such occasions.
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