d begun; as if winter,
secure in his domination of the frozen earth, could afford to relax his
vigour and admit the approaches of the sun, like a playful child whom
one could banish at will. A line of white clouds, with purple bases,
were drawn about the horizon, standing like anger, as it were, within
call. The sky on every side was of that deep transparency seen after
many days of rain. The colours of the earth and grass were deepened and
intense from the same cause. In many places in the fields, sheets of
water showed above the grass, vivid as a wet rock just washed by the sea
and colour hidden at other times glowed from the steeped ground.
Villages and houses showed from a great distance as if some obscuring
medium had been removed, and the remote country lay a deep band of
indigo beneath the horizon, like a distant sea escaping under a light
and infinite heaven.

Anne Hilton set off after the evening milking to visit a bed-ridden
woman of her acquaintance who lived in a cottage in one of the numerous
by-lanes intersecting the now bared fields. She was a woman who had lain
many years in the kitchen, whose narrow, hot space was all she saw of
the world. She was not a cheerful invalid, but peevish and querulous.
The irritation with which she always lived, waking from sleep to be at
once aware of it, and to know no pause during her waking hours, had worn
away a temperament which might almost have been gay. At very rare
intervals Anne had heard her laugh, and the laugh had such a note of
gaiety in it that she surmised the nature that had been, as it were,
knawed thin by this never-sleeping worm. It was pity for something
imprisoned and smothered which made Anne a steadfast friend to the
unhappy woman, whose other friends had long tired of her incessant
complaints and down-cast mind.

Elizabeth Richardson had never any hesitation in expressing her
opinions, and Anne had scarcely seated herself by the bed of the
unfortunate woman, whose harrowed face told of the torment within, than
she began to ask questions of the disgrace of Jane Evans, whom, she had
heard, was to have a child to crown all. But contrary to Anne's
expectations the bed-ridden woman was friendly to the girl. The habit of
neglect and scarcely-veiled impatience with which she had for many years
been treated, and of which she had been fully and silently aware, had
produced in her tortured mind an exasperated rebellion against the
opinions of her neighbours