"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.
"Pure religion, and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."
She saw exactly what she would do. There was the child, motherless, and worse than fatherless. She would take him and bring him up unspotted from the world. It was clearly a leading for her. She had not been permitted to save the girl, but she might take and protect the boy. She remembered even the commonsense of Mrs Hankworth. "It's soonest forgotten about if it's a boy." She was not so much an old maid as a woman shut up from issue, and she had no fear of a child. And in the midst of her bewilderment about the girl, about death and the hereafter, she could see an earthly duty clearly, and pure religion for herself. She began to sing: