Anne was returning from the nearest village one afternoon in the solemn winter sunshine, she determined suddenly to pay a second visit to Jane.  And she would try to be less hard on Burton, which would perhaps draw Jane to her.  It might be that she needed a friend by now.  Half a mile from her own cottage she came to a three-cornered patch of the way where several roads met.  By one side was a pond with two posts painted white as a mark for drivers at night-time.  The sloping edge of the pond was trodden into mud by the feet of horses stopping to drink, and as Anne, crossing the road to avoid the mud, arrived opposite one of the posts, she saw a bill posted upon it announcing a sale.

“I must see what it is,” she said.  “Perhaps it’s something for Mary.”  She read the heading.  “Sale of Bankrupt Stock.”

“It seems to be nothing but horses,” she said as she read the list.  Two men carrying forks on their shoulders came at that moment from the Ashley Road and joined her, looking over her shoulder at the bill.

“I heard about it this morning,” said one.  “I thought he couldn’t last long at that rate.  It was always spending and making a show.”

“There was someone else in it,” said the other.  “They say Burton’s done a moonlight flitting and gone to America.”

Anne, whose thoughts had been engrossed by a new opportunity for Mary, became aware of calamity of a new sort.  She turned to the men.

“What has happened?” she asked, though even as she spoke she had grasped it all.  The man, a young, fair-haired man of twenty-six, with great breadth of chest and long straight legs, answered with the willingness of a countryman to spread news.

“Why, that Richard Burton’s gone bankrupt and made a bolt.  They say it’ll take the house as well as the horses to pay it all up.  The bailiffs was in to-day as I passed taking it all down.  It’s a bad job for somebody, I heard,” he said winking at the other man.  He, glancing at Anne, looked embarrassed and pretended not to see.

“Can either of you tell me where the girl who was living there has gone?  Is she still there?” she asked the latter man.

“Not she!” answered the former.

“They say she walked in the night to Ashley Union,” said the elder man.  “She’s there now and nobody saw her go, so I suppose she must have done.  It’s a good eight miles of a walk.”

“Do her good,” said the younger man; and they began to discuss the list and quality of the horses for sale.

Anne walked on.  It had come then, and sooner than it was looked for.  Jane’s fancy-work and “lady-like” life seemed like the play-things of a baby by the side of a scaffold, as helpless and as foolish.

“I was going to the Union to-morrow anyway for Elizabeth Richardson,” said Anne, as she unlocked her door, trying not to see Jane Evans walking all alone, with no new house or protector, through the darkness of which she was afraid, to the formidable iron gate of the Union.