"Well, you know," expostulated Dick, "I don't know as it's anybody's business. Everybody's got their own affairs to attend to."
"Oh yes! I know," said Anne. "It's never anybody's business to try to prevent such things, but it'll be everybody's business to throw stones at the girl very soon, if the man tires of her."
"I don't know about preventing," returned Dick; "she seemed pretty set on him herself. I think myself it's a pity. Here's the eggs from Mary Colton, Miss Hilton—three dozen," he added, as a diversion from the conversation, which he found more embarrassing than the sermon he had successfully avoided. With that he escaped from the chair with a jerk, scuffled his feet once or twice on the floor, took his cap out of his pocket, and ejaculated "Good-night."
"Good-night," replied Anne, still preoccupied. "Thank you for bringing the eggs;" and she sat down with a slight groan.
"Why, it might be herself," reflected Dick, looking back at the dejected figure in the darkening room. Being a simple youth, he felt vaguely uncomfortable at the sight of such trouble over the doings of one who was no relation, and began to take a little blame to himself for thinking lightly of the girl's downfall.
"Well, she's very good," he concluded in his thoughts, "but she's peculiar;" and he tramped heavily through the yard into the lane.
Anne did not stir. She was so shocked that her bodily faculties seemed to have ceased, and her mind to have remained sorrowing and awake. This lapse was even worse than that of Sir Richard's son, because it seemed irretrievable. Then, too, it had happened before she knew anything about it, whereas, in the other case, she had been active, and able to expostulate and screen the young man's fall. And then, too, there was the surprise of a middle-aged woman at the lapses of "young, strong people," just as, if one of more maturity had fallen, the comment of the young would have been equally certain, "an old thing like her."
To Anne, whose temptations were of the kind that betray rather than assault, all faults of the flesh seemed of equal gravity—a man's gluttony or drunkenness, or a woman's misdemeanour. The one did not shock her more than the other. She thought of her old friend, the grandmother who had brought up the girls, denying herself sleep and ease that they might not run wild as many girls do, but might grow up girls of good character. Since the grandmother died, Jane, who was young and pretty, had tried to support herself. Anne did not know Richard Burton, but he was older and a "married man," which, of itself, implied responsibility to her mind. With the passion for justice, in which her intellectual faculties found material for exercise, she declared that Burton must be more to blame than Jane. He had money and position in the country-side. But equally as he was more to blame he would be less blamed. No one would dare to tell him he was wrong. They would wait, stone in hand, for the girl who had been a child among them, and when she was forsaken and alone would throw and strike. Anne lived apart, but she knew that. "It will be visited on the girl," she thought; and indignation at Richard Burton rose steadily in her thoughts.
After a while she stirred, and, lighting a candle, slowly stooped and raised the lid of the bread-mug. Pulling out half a loaf, she cut a thick piece for supper. She ate it slowly, with a piece of cold bacon, then, taking the candle, her shadow growing gigantic behind her, she fastened the door without looking outside, and climbed the stairs, heavily and sorrowfully, to her solitary bedroom, her shadow with one jerk filling the whole room.