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