was a thing that could be accomplished.

It was a wet day, chilly and rueful. There were not even clouds in the
sky to vary the steady grey, and the heaven itself seemed to have
slipped from its height and to be close upon the earth. Trees, grass,
hedges were drenched, and remained motionless with leaves drooping under
an added weight. The ditches were noisy, but beyond the occasional
rattle of a cart there was no other sound than the rain, a sound so
unvaried that it presently became as a silence, and one imagined that
the world had ceased to have a voice. Anne opened the door many times
and looked out to see always the same grey sheet before her. The gutter
on the shippon splashing its overflow on the flags of the yard, the hens
crowding dejectedly within the open door of the henhouse, and the water
lying green between the cobble-stones of the path. Nothing could be done
in the garden. The sodden flowers would not be fit for to-morrow's
market. The pony had cast its shoe and must be shod before next day.

"This is more important than the pony," Anne said to herself, putting on
her market-cloak and drawing on with difficulty her elastic-sided boots.
She fastened her skirt high with an old silk cord and took her umbrella.
Remembering that she had not covered the fire, and that it would have
burnt away before she returned, she took a bucket out to the coal-house.
The wet dross hissed and smoked as she covered the fire. She drew out
the damper to heat the water, turned back the rag hearthrug lest a
cinder should fall on it in her absence, and once more taking her
umbrella, and lifting the key from its nail on the cupboard door, went
out into the rain. She locked the door on the outside, and hid the big
key on the ledge of the manger in the shippon. Then she was outside in
the steady rain, on the gritty turnpike road washed clean to the stones.
As she set off, it was a small relief to her that she would not be
noticed, unless when she passed the cottages, because there were few
workers in the fields, and none who could help it out of doors.

It was a walk of five miles which was before her, and soon the sinking
of heart with which she had set out, began to disappear before the
necessity of setting one foot before the other in a steady walk. The
irritating pain of rheumatism began, too, to vex her and distract her
thoughts. It was not a very familiar country to her after she had passed
the Ashley high road. There were few