Page:Life's little ironies (1894).pdf/267
"'As for Harriet, she and her lover were married in due time; but by all account her life was no jocund ope. She and ber good-man found that they could not live comfortably at Longpuddle by reason of her connection with Jack’s misfortanes, and they settled in a distant town, and were no more heard of by us; Mrs. Palmley, too, found it advisable to join ’em shortly after. The dark-eyed, gaunt old Mrs, Winter, remembered by the emigrant gentleman here, was, as you will have foreseen, the Mrs. Winter of this story ; and I can well call to mind how lonely she was, how afraid the children were of ber, and how she kept herself as a stranger among us, though she lived so long.”
“Longpuddle has had her sad experiences as well so her sunny ones,” said Mr. Lackland.
“Yes, yes. But I am thankful to say not many like that, though good and bad have lived among us,”
“There was Georgy Crookhill—he was one of the shady eort, as I have reason to know,” observed the registrar, with the manner of a man who would like to have his say also.
“I used to hear what he was as a boy at school.”
“ Well, as be began so he went on. It never got so far as a hanging matter with him, to be sure; but he had some narrow escapes of penal servitude, and once it was a case of the biter bit.”