e.'

'That's very good of you,' said Anne, her face warming with a generous
sense of his straightforwardness. 'But my mother is so entirely ignorant
of a soldier's life, and the life of a soldier's wife--she is so simple
in all such matters, that I cannot listen to you any more readily for
what she may say.'

'Then it is all over for me,' said the poor trumpet-major, wiping his
face and putting away his handkerchief with an air of finality.

Anne was silent. Any woman who has ever tried will know without
explanation what an unpalatable task it is to dismiss, even when she does
not love him, a man who has all the natural and moral qualities she would
desire, and only fails in the social. Would-be lovers are not so
numerous, even with the best women, that the sacrifice of one can be felt
as other than a good thing wasted, in a world where there are few good
things.

'You are not angry, Miss Garland?' said he, finding that she did not
speak.

'O no. Don't let us say anything more about this now.' And she moved
on.

When she drew near to the miller and her mother she perceived that they
were engaged in a conversation of that peculiar kind which is all the
more full and communicative from the fact of definitive words being few.
In short, here the game was succeeding which with herself had failed. It
was pretty clear from the symptoms, marks, tokens, telegraphs, and
general byplay between widower and widow, that Miller Loveday must have
again said to Mrs. Garland some such thing as he had said before, with
what result this time she did not know.

As the situation was delicate, Anne halted awhile apart from them. The
trumpet-major, quite ignorant of how his cause was entered into by the
white-coated man in the distance (for his father had not yet told him of
his designs upon Mrs. Garland), did not advance, but stood still by the
gate, as though he were attending a princess, waiting till he should be
called up. Thus they lingered, and the day began to break. Mrs. Garland
and the miller took no heed of the time, and what it was bringing to
earth and sky, so occupied were they with themselves; but Anne in her
place and the trumpet-major in his, each in private thought of no bright
kind, watched the gradual glory of the east through all its tones and
changes. The world of birds and insects got lively, the blue and the
yellow and the gold of Loveday's uniform again became distinct; the sun
bored its way upward, t