The story concerns Elizabeth Bates, a coal miner's wife. She has two children and is pregnant with a third. She angrily waits for her alcoholic husband to come home from the mine, but suspects that he is at the pub getting drunk. Elizabeth's neighbour runs to the pub, but her husband is nowhere to be found; it is later revealed that he died in an accident in the coal mine earlier that day. His fellow workmen return with his body, and as Elizabeth and her mother-in-law prepare him for burial, Elizabeth reflects on her husband and feels that they never really knew each other at all.
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