She was staring and her skin had turned blue-white. She broke into a short hysteric laugh and fell down. Then she was very sick and fainted and had to be taken home trembling so that she could scarcely crawl as she walked, with great tears dropping down her cold face. Janway's Mills knew well enough after this that Jack Williams had deserted her, and had no hesitation in suggesting a reason for his defection. The months which followed were filled with the torments of a squalid Inferno. Girls who had regarded her with envy, began to refuse to speak to her or to be seen in her company. Jack Williams's companions were either impudent or disdainful, the married women stared at her and commented on her as she passed; there were no more picnics or excursions for her; her feathers became draggled and hung broken in her hat. She had no relatives in the village, having come from a country place. She was thankful that she had not a family of aunts on the spot, because she knew they would have despised her and talked her over more than the rest. She lived in a bare little room which she rented from a poor couple, and she used to sit alone in it, huddled up in a heap by the window, crying for hours in the evening as she watched the other girls go by laughing and joking with their sweethearts. One night when there was a sociable in the little frame Methodist church opposite, and she saw it lighted up and the people going in dressed in their best clothes and excited at meeting each other, the girls giggling at the sight of their favourite young men--just as she had giggled six months before--her slow tears began to drip faster and the sobs came one upon another until she was choked by them and she began to make a noise. She sobbed and cried more convulsively, until she began to scream and went into something like hysterics. She dropped down on her face and rolled over and over, clutching at her breast and her sides and throwing out her arms. The people of the house had gone to the sociable and she was alone, so no one heard or came near her. She shrieked and sobbed and rolled over and over, clutching at her flesh, trying to gasp out words that choked her. "O, Lord!" she gasped, wild with the insensate agony of a poor, hysteria torn, untaught, uncontrolled thing, "I don't know what I've done! I don't! 'Tain't fair! I didn't go to! I can't bear it! He h'ain't got nothin' to bear, he ain't! O, Lord God, look down on me!" She was the poor, helpless outcome of the commonest phase of life, but her garret saw a ghastly tragedy as she choked through her hysterics. Who is to blame for and who to prevent such tragedies, let deep thinkers strive to tell.