And so I gave up going too. I wouldn't seem to be judging father,
not though I might be judged myself by all the village. But when I
heard the church-bells ringing, ringing, it was like as if some one
that loved me was calling to me and me not answering; and sometimes
when all the folk was in church, I used to hobble up on my crutches
to the gate and stand there and sometimes hear a bit of the singing
come through the open door.

It was the end of August that Mr. Barber at the shop fell off a
ladder leading to his wareroom, and was killed on the spot; and Mrs.
Jarvis, she says to me, 'If that young Barber comes home, as I
suppose he will, to take what's his by right in the eyes of the law,
he might as well go and put his head into an oven on a baking-day,
and get his worst friend to shove his legs in after him and shut the
door to.'

'He won't come back,' says I. 'How could he face it, when every one
in the village knows it?'

For when Ellen died it could not be kept secret any longer, and a
heap of folks that would have drawn their skirts aside rather than
brush against her if she had been there alive and well, with her
baby at her breast, had a tear and a kind word for her now that she
was gone where no tears and no words could get at her for good or
evil.

I see once a bit of poetry in a book, and it said when a woman had
done what she had done, the only way to get forgiven is to die, and
I believe that's true. But it isn't true of fathers and sisters.