So one spoke, another spoke, with nods and head-shakings, with whispered comments and breathlessly uttered words, for a story of shame and ruin has attraction for many who will not speak of shame and ruin aloud. Poor, beautiful Annie, so proud and sensitive, at what strange fate had your wayward life arrived, into whose unworthy hands had it been committed, before it could sink into such forlornness, such desperation as this? The gossipping village, although it asked these questions, was not possessed of any means of answering them; it could chatter of the figure that lay upon the door-step, but beyond that door-step it had no right to pry. But we, who possess privileges that the village could not gain, need listen no longer to its idle words; we will cross the threshold of the cottage near the Thackbusk, and observe the mother and daughter, alone there in loneliness. CHAPTER XXII IN THE HOME NEAR THE THACKBUSK THE cottage near the Thackbusk was closed to visitors--Jenny said that her daughter was ill, and must be quiet. The statement was supposed to be intended as a protection against intruders, but at the same time there may have been truth in it. For, from the moment when Annie had been carried from the door-step, she had lain in her room upstairs, too weak to move. Jenny went about quietly, and was upstairs or below, and her light foot-fall was the only sound that could be heard. Poor Jenny! If those who made free with her name could have kept their eyes on her through those silent hours they would not have seen her give way to lamentation, or leave off her employments to indulge herself in grief. Working people have little leisure for idleness--not even for the idleness that calls itself despair--and the habits of life are not easily discarded, even in the midst of overwhelming bitterness. Jenny went about quietly, and filled her pail with water, or prepared Nat’s breakfast, or cleared the meal away, her blue working-apron above her neat black dress, and a red handkerchief on her head to protect it from the dust. A stranger, setting eyes for the first time on Mrs Salter, would have been pleased with her quiet movements, her slim, girlish form; he would have had keen eyes to have been able to discover also the traces of a sorrow that was not a girlish grief. For that only showed itself in a little more pallor than usual, a little more compression of what was still a pretty mouth. Mrs Salter was not likely to have the sorrow that makes outcries; but the grief that is silent is the grief that kills.