Anne sat down beside Jane and began to sing—­

“I was a wandering sheep;
I did not love the fold.”

The Matron watched with an air of curiosity.  Jane did not cease staring into the fire.

“It’s no use, Miss Hilton.  I daresay the old lady’s a bit right.  There’s a slice of temper in it too.  But we can’t waste all day over her.”

Anne took Jane’s hand.  “I’ll come and see you again in a little while,” she said.  “And remember, there’s always One that’ll hear all that you can’t tell to any one else.  He’s with you here waiting to hear and help you.”  She lingered.  There was no response.  The Matron walked briskly towards the door.

“Well, the old ones are easier to manage,” she said.  She led the way downstairs and left Anne on the doorstep of the big front door.  The porter shut it with a clang.

The pony was pawing the gravel outside the gate and pulling hard with his head.  He backed the cart vigorously into the road as Anne untied his head, and set off at a good pace towards the town.

“I’ll go up to-morrow and see Mrs Hankworth,” said Anne.  “She’ll perhaps be able to say something to help.”

CHAPTER XV

Mrs Hankworth lived at one of the largest farms in the country, some three miles away from Anne Hilton’s cottage.  The farmstead was, contrary to the usual custom, not placed near the high road for convenience, but on an eminence in the midst of its own lands.  A road had been cut to it between cornfields, so that in the time of springing corn a man walking on this road seemed to be wading to the knees in a green undulating sea, which had risen and submerged the hill.  The farm itself was large, with a garden unusually well kept, a sign that the mistress counted in the establishment.  Old rose trees grew almost to the roof of the wide building, and the thick turf bore token to the richness of the soil.

Inside, the passage, the stairs, the rooms, were all spacious, and, in spite of the rattling of cans and the sound of voices in the kitchen, the place retained an atmosphere of quiet and tranquillity, not of isolation or desertion, but of that comfortable restfulness which one recalls as a child, when, having been ill, one is left at home when the others have gone to school, and remains in a quiet house, watching contentedly the leisurely cheerful movements of one’s mother.

Mrs Hankworth, the mistress of the best farm in the country, was an enormously stout but very active woman.  Her husband, a man half her size and an excellent farmer, exhibited only one trait of nervousness, and that on her account.  If she went to market without him he was uneasy until she came back lest something should have happened to her.  In all the fifteen years of their married life they had never slept out of their own bed, and they had had no honeymoon.