plan for taking him into the mill, and letting him have a comfortable
time o't after his long knocking about; but so much depends upon you that
I must bide a bit till I see what your pleasure is about the poor fellow.
Mind, my dear, I don't want to force ye; I only just ask ye.'

Anne meditatively regarded the miller from under her shady eyelids, the
fingers of one hand playing a silent tattoo on her bosom. 'I don't know
what to say to you,' she answered brusquely, and went away.

But these discourses were not without their effect upon the extremely
conscientious mind of Anne. They were, moreover, much helped by an
incident which took place one evening in the autumn of this year, when
John came to tea. Anne was sitting on a low stool in front of the fire,
her hands clasped across her knee. John Loveday had just seated himself
on a chair close behind her, and Mrs. Loveday was in the act of filling
the teapot from the kettle which hung in the chimney exactly above Anne.
The kettle slipped forward suddenly, whereupon John jumped from the chair
and put his own two hands over Anne's just in time to shield them, and
the precious knee she clasped, from the jet of scalding water which had
directed itself upon that point. The accidental overflow was instantly
checked by Mrs. Loveday; but what had come was received by the devoted
trumpet-major on the back of his hands.

Anne, who had hardly been aware that he was behind her, started up like a
person awakened from a trance. 'What have you done to yourself, poor
John, to keep it off me!' she cried, looking at his hands.

John reddened emotionally at her words, 'It is a bit of a scald, that's
all,' he replied, drawing a finger across the back of one hand, and
bringing off the skin by the touch.

'You are scalded painfully, and I not at all!' She gazed into his kind
face as she had never gazed there before, and when Mrs. Loveday came back
with oil and other liniments for the wound Anne would let nobody dress it
but herself. It seemed as if her coyness had all gone, and when she had
done all that lay in her power she still sat by him. At his departure
she said what she had never said to him in her life before: 'Come again
soon!'

In short, that impulsive act of devotion, the last of a series of the
same tenor, had been the added drop which finally turned the wheel.
John's character deeply impressed her. His determined steadfastness to
his lode star won her admiration,