feeling all the embarrassment; and Bob, who had done
the wrong, feeling apparently quite at ease.

'You'll speak to Bob, won't you, honey?' said the miller after a silence.
To meet Bob like this after an absence seemed irregular in his eyes.

'If he wish me to,' she replied, so addressing the miller that no part,
scrap, or outlying beam whatever of her glance passed near the subject of
her remark.

'He's a lieutenant, you know, dear,' said her mother on the same side;
'and he's been dreadfully wounded.'

'Oh?' said Anne, turning a little towards the false one; at which Bob
felt it to be time for him to put in a spoke for himself.

'I am glad to see you,' he said contritely; 'and how do you do?'

'Very well, thank you.'

He extended his hand. She allowed him to take hers, but only to the
extent of a niggardly inch or so. At the same moment she glanced up at
him, when their eyes met, and hers were again withdrawn.

The hitch between the two younger members of the household tended to make
the breakfast a dull one. Bob was so depressed by her unforgiving manner
that he could not throw that sparkle into his stories which their
substance naturally required; and when the meal was over, and they went
about their different businesses, the pair resembled the two Dromios in
seldom or never being, thanks to Anne's subtle contrivances, both in the
same room at the same time.

This kind of performance repeated itself during several days. At last,
after dogging her hither and thither, leaning with a wrinkled forehead
against doorposts, taking an oblique view into the room where she
happened to be, picking up worsted balls and getting no thanks, placing a
splinter from the Victory, several bullets from the Redoubtable, a strip
of the flag, and other interesting relics, carefully labelled, upon her
table, and hearing no more about them than if they had been pebbles from
the nearest brook, he hit upon a new plan. To avoid him she frequently
sat upstairs in a window overlooking the garden. Lieutenant Loveday
carefully dressed himself in a new uniform, which he had caused to be
sent some days before, to dazzle admiring friends, but which he had never
as yet put on in public or mentioned to a soul. When arrayed he entered
the sunny garden, and there walked slowly up and down as he had seen
Nelson and Captain Hardy do on the quarter-deck; but keeping his right
shoulder, on which his one epaulette was fixed, as much towards An