but the practical difficulties issuing from
it. But she had unthinkingly stumbled upon the scandal, and she went on,
"I was sorry to hear of Jane Evans forgetting herself like she has."

"Poor girl," said Anne; "she seems so certain that it'll last. What was
so sad to me, was that a girl brought up as she was by her grandmother
should have so little sense of her position."

"She's happy, I suppose," said Mary, "and there's no need to look
further. She'll find it hard to earn a living if he gets tired of her."

"He's not an ill-natured man," said Anne. "You feel as though if he'd
been brought up to have a respect for good behaviour he wouldn't have
got loose so easily. He thinks he's doing a generous thing, and giving
Jane a good time, without thinking what the result must be to her good
character. He doesn't like to see people unhappy, as he calls
unhappiness. He hasn't learnt the results of sin in his own experience,
and won't look at them in others. He kept on telling me she'd got a
servant of her own, and needn't do anything but fancy-work. They'd
neither of them hear anything I could say. I can't understand how they
came to know one another at the beginning. It seems to have come about
without anyone's knowing till it was too late."

"He seems a joking sort of man," said Mary. "Once he came up to buy a
paper, and gave me half a sovereign instead of sixpence to change, and
when I told him he'd made a mistake he laughed a lot, and said he wanted
to know if I could tell the difference. He never sees me now without
speaking of it and laughing."

"Yes," said Anne; "he's fond of rough jokes of his own making, and
thinks that giving people material things makes them happy," she
continued in her bookish manner. "I remember just such another man as
him, a boisterous sort of man, whose old father was dying, who took the
old man out to look at a new grand-stand they were making. Poor old man!
It was pitiful to see him in the presence of eternity, looking at a new
grand-stand."

"I suppose, being as I am," said Mary, "there's a lot of temptations
been spared to me."

"I wish we were all as kind and charitable as you," said Anne. "I never
heard you say a hard thing of anybody all the years I've known you."

CHAPTER XII

Winter hastens his pace when the harvest is gathered, and it was one of
those serene winter days on which, if one sat in a sheltered place full
of sunshine, one might believe that the spring ha