“Go on!  Aren’t you going to begin?” said one of them.

“She’s a funny old thing, this one,” said the Matron to Anne, stopping to watch, as the old woman, holding her skirts to her knees, her clogs clacking, and with a smile of imbecility fixed on her face, began to hop from one thin leg to the other, stamping slowly round on her heels in the artless manner of a child.  All at once she stopped, and, pulling up her apron, put a corner of it in her mouth, hanging her head and giggling.

“They’re all looking at me, all them men,” she giggled.  “Fancy me dancing with all them men looking.”  One of the men broke into a laugh, which was changed immediately into an attack of asthma.

“Dance again, old lady!” called a younger man, with the effects of hard drinking visible in his face.

The shrunken and pitiful figure revolved several times, stamping on her heels, then stopped with the same grotesque coquetry.

“She’s a funny old thing, isn’t she?” said the Matron to Anne.  “She gives us many a laugh.”

“It’s too humbling to look at.  I cannot laugh,” said Anne.  “Poor old thing, to have come to that.”

“She doesn’t know, you know,” said the Matron.  “You’re wasting your pity.  They’re most of them better off in the infirmary here than they were outside.  You’ve no idea what a dirty state she was found in for one.”

“It’s the painfulness of such a sight—­age without honour,” repeated Anne.

“I’ve no time to think of that sort of thing,” replied the Matron, as they began to ascend the wide stairs to the bed rooms, a woman, who was scrubbing the steps with sand, standing aside to let them pass.

Several women were sitting up in bed, with starched night-caps nodding at different angles.  Over the fireplace was a lithograph of Queen Victoria giving the Bible as the source of England’s greatness to an Indian potentate, and beneath it, sitting very still in a large armchair, was Jane Evans staring into the fire.  She was very quiet, broken, and helplessly docile.  Her stillness was alarming.  She seemed to be already dead in spirit.  Even the child soon to be separated from her scarcely concerned her.  She was quite neat.  Thin and fatigued as her face was, she did not appear to have suffered greatly in health.

“Jane, my dear, I’ve not come to blame you,” began Anne, “I’ve come to see if there’s anything I can do to make it easier for you to face the future and what’s coming.  I only heard of you coming here by accident or you shouldn’t have been left alone.  You mustn’t think everybody’s forsaken you and you’ve no friend left to you.  It’s often the case that you know your true friends in trouble,” she continued sententiously.  “And if only you could find the best Friend of all now when you need Him most.”  Her prim phrasing changed to earnestness.  “There was a woman once that they dragged out in front of everybody for evil-doing.  But He wouldn’t have it.  He put them to silence, and then when she was all alone with Him He showed her how tender He was to them that do wrong.  If you only knew Him and His kindness, and how He can understand any kind of trouble.  There’s a good deal you think none of us can understand, but He can if you tell Him.”  She wiped her eyes.  Jane did not seem to have heard.