“Poor girl,” said Anne; “she seems so certain that it’ll last.  What was so sad to me, was that a girl brought up as she was by her grandmother should have so little sense of her position.”

“She’s happy, I suppose,” said Mary, “and there’s no need to look further.  She’ll find it hard to earn a living if he gets tired of her.”

“He’s not an ill-natured man,” said Anne.  “You feel as though if he’d been brought up to have a respect for good behaviour he wouldn’t have got loose so easily.  He thinks he’s doing a generous thing, and giving Jane a good time, without thinking what the result must be to her good character.  He doesn’t like to see people unhappy, as he calls unhappiness.  He hasn’t learnt the results of sin in his own experience, and won’t look at them in others.  He kept on telling me she’d got a servant of her own, and needn’t do anything but fancy-work.  They’d neither of them hear anything I could say.  I can’t understand how they came to know one another at the beginning.  It seems to have come about without anyone’s knowing till it was too late.”

“He seems a joking sort of man,” said Mary.  “Once he came up to buy a paper, and gave me half a sovereign instead of sixpence to change, and when I told him he’d made a mistake he laughed a lot, and said he wanted to know if I could tell the difference.  He never sees me now without speaking of it and laughing.”

“Yes,” said Anne; “he’s fond of rough jokes of his own making, and thinks that giving people material things makes them happy,” she continued in her bookish manner.  “I remember just such another man as him, a boisterous sort of man, whose old father was dying, who took the old man out to look at a new grand-stand they were making.  Poor old man!  It was pitiful to see him in the presence of eternity, looking at a new grand-stand.”

“I suppose, being as I am,” said Mary, “there’s a lot of temptations been spared to me.”

“I wish we were all as kind and charitable as you,” said Anne.  “I never heard you say a hard thing of anybody all the years I’ve known you.”

CHAPTER XII

Winter hastens his pace when the harvest is gathered, and it was one of those serene winter days on which, if one sat in a sheltered place full of sunshine, one might believe that the spring had begun; as if winter, secure in his domination of the frozen earth, could afford to relax his vigour and admit the approaches of the sun, like a playful child whom one could banish at will.  A line of white clouds, with purple bases, were drawn about the horizon, standing like anger, as it were, within call.  The sky on every side was of that deep transparency seen after many days of rain.  The colours of the earth and grass were deepened and intense from the same cause.  In many places in the fields, sheets of water showed above the grass, vivid as a wet rock just washed by the sea and colour hidden at other times glowed from the steeped ground.  Villages and houses showed from a great distance as if some obscuring medium had been removed, and the remote country lay a deep band of indigo beneath the horizon, like a distant sea escaping under a light and infinite heaven.