"I told her what her life would be with a loose-living scoundrel like Castleton, but she would not listen--madly in love with him and his handsome face, and now he has killed her at twenty-two!"
"I had a very distressing interview with Lady Catherine a few weeks ago. She went away in disgust and despair when I had to tell her that I did not think she had sufficient evidence for a divorce, and that she must prove cruelty or desertion as well as adultery."
"D---d shameful law, sir; can't think how the country puts up with it. But she shall be safe from him if she lives, my poor little girl!"
Then they were silent, for the shadow of death crept nearer.
Outside the park gates at the end of the village, in Castleton Union, another girl lay dying. The local practitioner had been called in on his way back from consultation with the great gynæcologists, and as at the hall, so in the workhouse, he found his patient sinking. "She came in late last night, sir," said the nurse, "and the child was born almost immediately. Her pulse is very weak, and I can't rouse her; she won't even look at the child."
"I hear it is Jennie Appleton, the carpenter's daughter at Kingsford--very respectable people. How did she get here?"
"Usual thing. Got into trouble at her situation in London; the man promised to marry her, but he kept putting it off, and then one day he disappeared, and wrote to her from Glasgow saying that he was a married man. She came back home, but her father drove her out with blows and curses, and she walked here from Kingsford--goodness knows how. It is a sad case, and the relieving officer tells me she will probably not be able to get any affiliation order enforced, as the man has evaded liability by going to Scotland."
"Abominable!" said the doctor; then he went towards the bedside of his patient, felt her pulse, glanced at the temperature chart, and his face grew grave.
Taking the babe from the cradle, he laid it beside the mother: "You have a pretty little girl."
The eyelids flickered, and, as the Countess had spoken, so spoke the pauper: "God help her!"
"He will," said the doctor, who was a religious man.
"He didn't help me. He let me come to this, and I was born respectable. She is only a little come-by-chance maid."