m his hand; his face became suddenly fixed, and his natural
complexion took itself off, leaving a greenish yellow in its stead. The
young person, on her part, had no sooner looked closely at him than she
said weakly, 'Robert's brother!' and changed colour yet more rapidly than
the soldier had done. The faintness, previously half counterfeit, seized
on her now in real earnest.

'I don't feel well,' she said, suddenly rising by an effort. 'This warm
day has quite upset me!'

There was a regular collapse of the tea-party, like that of the Hamlet
play scene. Bob seized his sweetheart and carried her upstairs, the
miller exclaiming, 'Ah, she's terribly worn by the journey! I thought
she was when I saw her nearly go off at the blare of the cow. No woman
would have been frightened at that if she'd been up to her natural
strength.'

'That, and being so very shy of men, too, must have made John's handsome
regimentals quite overpowering to her, poor thing,' added Mrs. Garland,
following the catastrophic young lady upstairs, whose indisposition was
this time beyond question. And yet, by some perversity of the heart, she
was as eager now to make light of her faintness as she had been to make
much of it two or three hours ago.

The miller and John stood like straight sticks in the room the others had
quitted, John's face being hastily turned towards a caricature of
Buonaparte on the wall that he had not seen more than a hundred and fifty
times before.

'Come, sit down and have a dish of tea, anyhow,' said his father at last.
'She'll soon be right again, no doubt.'

'Thanks; I don't want any tea,' said John quickly. And, indeed, he did
not, for he was in one gigantic ache from head to foot.

The light had been too dim for anybody to notice his amazement; and not
knowing where to vent it, the trumpet-major said he was going out for a
minute. He hastened to the bakehouse; but David being there, he went to
the pantry; but the maid being there, he went to the cart-shed; but a
couple of tramps being there, he went behind a row of French beans in the
garden, where he let off an ejaculation the most pious that he had
uttered that Sabbath day: 'Heaven! what's to be done!'

And then he walked wildly about the paths of the dusky garden, where the
trickling of the brooks seemed loud by comparison with the stillness
around; treading recklessly on the cracking snails that had come forth to
feed, and entangling his spurs in the l