nearly always to blame somewhere. You just take notice of _that_," she
added, turning to her daughters who were listening eagerly for details.

"I wonder she's the face to go about," said the elder girl, a very
pretty young woman of twenty, who, being engaged to a young carpenter,
assumed the virtue of a girl who'd no need to seek about for lovers, and
of a class whose sensibilities were shocked by this lapse. Her mother
looked mollified, and gazed at the girl's pretty face with satisfaction
in its comeliness for a few moments in silence. She was a delicate
woman, fretted by her nerves and the difficulty of making ends meet, but
she had real pleasure in her two girls, whose good looks and clever
taste in their clothes, made them always presentable.

"Some one ought to go and tell her what people think of her," said the
younger girl, who already showed her mother's nervous expression.

"Do it yourself," said her sister with a careless laugh.

"Nay, _I_ shan't interfere," replied the girl.

"You'd better not," said the mother. "You keep out of such things and
it'll be better for you. Well, here's Anne sitting with her plums.
You're very lucky to have a good tree like that," she added, as she
uncovered the basket. "We haven't a single good tree in the orchard. I
often say to James that we shouldn't have much less fruit, if they was
all cut down to-morrow."

Anne emptied the basket of plums into a basin the elder girl brought,
and received the money mechanically. She was thinking all the time of
Jane Evans and the careless laugh of the elder girl. Some one should