“Could I look at Jane?” asked Anne.

“They fastened it up this afternoon,” replied the Matron.  “There’ll be two funerals to-morrow.  The other’s an old man.  You can see all there is to see.”

She covered the baby and left the room, descending the same stairs, and going out of a side door.  A strong smell of disinfectants came out into the warm garden as she opened the door of a glazed brick building.  The blinds were down to keep out the sun.  The building was lined with white glazed brick, and two straight burdens lay on a trestle-table.

“Eight o’clock to-morrow,” said the Matron, coming out again and locking the door.

Jane had gone.  She was as confident as the baby in her absence.  It was that which impressed Anne.  Neither of the two so lately one flesh, needed or cared for the other.  Jane seemed to have shut herself of her own accord in that wooden case, so that she would be no longer teased or tortured, and the baby was quite happy that it should be so.  Their disregard one of the other was strange to Anne.

“Elizabeth Richardson was inquiring if you were coming,” said the Matron.  “Will you go up and see her?”

Elizabeth Richardson was lying in the bed that had been Jane’s.  She looked less peevish and more tended.  Anne glanced at the fireplace as she entered.  The armchair had been moved back, and no one sat at the fire.  She sighed and turned to Elizabeth.

“Yes, it’s very comfortable,” said Elizabeth.  “I’m glad I came.  It’s nice to have the bed made every day.  You’ll have heard that Jane Evans is out of her troubles?”

Anne nodded.

“It’s best, I think,” said Elizabeth.  “The world’s none too kind, and she was a depending sort of girl.  She got out of it easy enough.  There’ll be some disappointed though,” she added with her old cynicism.

“Don’t let’s be hard in our judgments,” said Anne, sadly.

CHAPTER XIX

The habit of working for another is so fixed in the lives of poor women, that the interruption of it becomes a kind of second death, almost as difficult to bear as the death of the affection which is itself almost a kind of habit.  When Anne returned from market, and sat down, her house seemed to have become a little emptier, because the girl whose welfare she had carried with her for so many months was beyond her reach.  She took down her Bible to read it, and find relief for her trouble.  She was a woman who had had “experience”—­that experience which comes to each as a kind of special revelation, a thing so surprising, that it appears impossible to think of its having happened before, or to withhold the telling; the cynicism, which declares this to be an overwhelming interest in one’s internal self, being only partially right, it being rather the excited and surprised mental condition which is the deep well from which all art, all expression, breaks forth.  She read slowly, trying to find meaning in each phrase, when suddenly a verse struck her in its entirety before her lips had finished reading.