The Jilting of Jane

As I sit writing in my study, I can hear our Jane bumping her way
downstairs with a brush and dust-pan. She used in the old days to sing
hymn tunes, or the British national song for the time being, to these
instruments, but latterly she has been silent and even careful over her
work. Time was when I prayed with fervour for such silence, and my wife
with sighs for such care, but now they have come we are not so glad as we
might have anticipated we should be. Indeed, I would rejoice secretly,
though it may be unmanly weakness to admit it, even to hear Jane sing
"Daisy," or, by the fracture of any plate but one of Euphemia's best green
ones, to learn that the period of brooding has come to an end.

Yet how we longed to hear the last of Jane's young man before we heard the
last of him! Jane was always very free with her conversation to my wife,
and discoursed admirably in the kitchen on a variety of topics--so well,
indeed, that I sometimes left my study door open--our house is a small
one--to partake of it. But after William came, it was always William,
nothing but William; William this and William that; and when we thought
William was worked out and exhausted altogether, then William all over
again. The engagement lasted altogether three years; yet how she got
introduced to William, and so became thus saturated with him, was always a
secret. For my part, I believe it was at the street corner where the Rev.
Barnabas Baux used to hold an open-air service after evensong on Sundays.
Young Cupids were wont to flit like moths round the paraffin flare of that
centre of High Church hymn-singing. I fancy she stood singing hymns there,
out of memory and her imagination, instead of coming home to get supper,
and William came up beside her and said, "Hello!" "Hello yourself!" she
said; and etiquette being satisfied, they proceeded to talk together.

As Euphemia has a reprehensible way of letting her servants talk to her,
she soon heard of him. "He is _such_ a respectable young man, ma'am,"
said Jane, "you don't know." Ignoring the slur cast on her acquaintance,
my wife inquired further about this William.

"He is second porter at Maynard's, the draper's," said Jane, "and gets
eighteen shillings--nearly a pound--a week, m'm; and when the head porter
leaves he will be head porter. His relatives are quite superior people,
m'm. Not labouring people at all. His father was a greengrosher, m'm, and
had a churnor, and he was bankrup' twice. And one of his sisters is in a
Home for the Dying. It will be a very good match for me, m'm," said Jane,
"me being an orphan girl."

"Then you are engaged to him?" asked my wife.

"Not engaged,