"Pray, do not mention it, Squire. Your kindness since has quite made me forget that you hesitated to take an utter stranger into your household."
"That was it, my dear—an utter stranger—and you cannot really blame me; here was Looizy and Kate and I was asked to take into the house with them a young woman whom I had never set eyes on before; it seemed to me a trifle risky, but you've proved that I was wrong, my dear, and I'll admit it."
The girl dropped the stocking she was mending; her trembling hand refused to support even the pretense of work. Outside the snow was falling just as it was falling, perhaps, on the little grave where all her youth and hope were buried.
The thought gave her courage to speak, though the pale lips struggled pitifully to frame the words.
"Squire, suppose that when I came to you that day last June you had been right—I am only saying this for the sake of argument, Squire—but suppose that I had been a deceived girl, that I had come here to begin all over again; to live down the injustice, the scandal and all the other things that unfortunate woman have to live down, would you still have felt the same?"
"Why, Anna, I never heard you talk like this before; of course I should have felt the same; if a commandment is broke, it's broke; nothing can alter that, can it?"
"But, Squire, is there no mercy, no chance held out to the woman who has been unfortunate?"
"Anna, these arguments don't sound well from a proper behaving young woman like you. I know it's the fashion nowadays for good women to talk about mercy to their fallen sisters, but it's a mistake. When a woman falls, she loses her right to respect, and that's the end of it."
She turned her face to the storm and the softly falling flakes were no whiter than her face.
As Anna turned to leave the room on some pretext, she saw Kate coming in with a huge bunch of Jacqueminot roses in her hand. Of course, Sanderson had sent them. The perfume of them sickened Anna, as the odor of a charnel house might have done. She tried to smile bravely at Kate, who smiled back triumphantly as she went in to show her uncle the flowers. But the sight of them was like the turning of a knife in a festering wound.