“But I should make as light of it as I could, if I were you, and wished the man well, as you say you do!” “Then if nothing is proved against him, he won’t have to marry her?” inquired the girl eagerly. “Obviously not. Her husband will have to take her back!” “Oh,” said Jane Anne, “and Mr. Rivers be just where he was before?” “Oh, is it Mr. Rivers? I know him slightly.” “Do you? Do you? Ma’am, then if you know him, will you tell him that Jane Anne Cawthorne is his friend, and wishes him well. Why, I would like to die for him, I would indeed!” “Then you had better lie for him a little!” She looked keenly at the girl as she spoke, and with ever so slight an accent on the word whose first letter she had altered, and she had the satisfaction of seeing Jane Anne redden. “Understate rather than overstate, you know!” She now ventured to say this, seeing by the girl’s confusion that the latter course was the one she had intended to take, or had perhaps even been suborned by a lawyer over-zealous in Mortimer Elles’s behalf to do. “Nothing extenuate--but naught set down in malice!” she went on. “Don’t deny anything, or hold back anything, but make as light of what you did see as possible!” “I think I hear my aunt calling me!” Jane Anne exclaimed suddenly. “I will just run and see what she wants, and be back in a moment.” Miss Giles admired Jane Anne’s method of gaining time. Did she really go to attend on her aunt, or did she simply stand outside the door for a while? In five minutes she came back, looking somehow quite a different woman, and said simply: “I want you to tell me how I can help him, ma’am?” “Say simply what you know, and no more!” “Then,” said Jane Anne, her eyes downcast, “I had better write to Mr. Perkins!” “Who is he?” “The lawyer gentleman who came here and saw me. He took down what I said on a piece of paper.” “Perhaps in what you said then you--exaggerated a little--did not you?” “Yes, ma’am, I did,” replied the girl, hiding her eyes in the apron she wore, and bursting into tears. “I was so angry with her and with him, because he would not even speak to me that last day, but shook my hand off his sleeve, that I said the worst I could. And truly I never saw no worse than him and her walking up the Broad Walk yonder hand in hand. It was the old lady saw him kissing her through the window, and standing by his bedroom door in the middle of the night. I didn’t see that, but I was there in the garden before,--it was I who took her to the window of his room, but I didn’t look, I couldn’t bear to. But I invented worse, and all I said, I told the lawyer I would swear to in Court.” “How very awful!” said Egidia. “But if you write and say that you are not prepared to swear this then the chances are that the case will fall to the ground, and you will not have to appear in Court at all.” “But then I shan’t even see him!” exclaimed Jane Anne.