“Yes, Ma’am,” eagerly agreed Jane, forgetting to be dignified. Whether Mrs. Elles should prove to be a Russian spy or not, the important thing was to separate her from Mr. Rivers. “She isn’t fit for him. I can’t abide her myself. I mistrusted her from the very first time I set eyes on her. Nasty painted thing! She’s only got two dresses to her back, and yet she wears rings worth I don’t know how much! Great big stones. She sings foreign songs to him, of an evening, in all sorts of queer languages—on my piano! He niver speaks a word to me now that she’s come! He used to say a kind word now and then. She was out with him in the Park, one night lately, till I don’t know what hour. It’s not decent! I was waiting at my window and I saw through a chink in the trees—I can see all down the Broad Walk, if I have a mind. I waited long enough, and I saw them come back down the walk together, and the moon was shining full on them, and I saw—” She hesitated.
“Was he?—Was she—?” Mrs. Popham asked, with timid, scared eagerness.
“They were walking hand in hand,” said Jane Anne, shyly, “and if that’s not being lovers, I don’t know what is!”
Her face relaxed, and she burst into tears.
“Don’t, Jane Anne, don’t go on like that! Perhaps they are engaged. My husband says so,” said Mrs. Popham, assuming that the staid girl’s tears proceeded from her sense of outraged morality. “But still, it is a very odd way to behave. They ought to get married, that’s all I can say!”
“Oh, ma’am, Mr. Rivers and a woman like that, with her painted cheeks and her hair—well, I shouldn’t like to have to swear that it is even her own! She’s not respectable, even if she is engaged to him. I could tell you things—and so could Dorothy, who waits on them!”
“Sh-h!” said the Vicar’s wife. “But we must get her away from him, somehow, Jane Anne.”
“Oh, Ma’am, if we only could! Dear Mr. Rivers! I’d do anything I could. Only, she can’t walk now.”
“If she is what we think her, that sprain of hers may be just a ruse. It probably is. I can bring myself to believe anything of a woman who masquerades under an assumed name. How do you know, by the way, that it is so?”
Jane Anne went into Rivers’ room with the air of one performing a religious rite, and fetched an umbrella out of the corner and handed it solemnly to the Vicar’s wife.