dious
dry fog; but the widow was of a friendly and thankful nature, and she
said that she did not mind it at all, being as it was, not nasty dirt,
but the blessed staff of life.

By good-humour of this sort, and in other ways, Mrs. Garland acknowledged
her friendship for her neighbour, with whom Anne and herself associated
to an extent which she never could have anticipated when, tempted by the
lowness of the rent, they first removed thither after her husband's death
from a larger house at the other end of the village. Those who have
lived in remote places where there is what is called no society will
comprehend the gradual levelling of distinctions that went on in this
case at some sacrifice of gentility on the part of one household. The
widow was sometimes sorry to find with what readiness Anne caught up some
dialect-word or accent from the miller and his friends; but he was so
good and true-hearted a man, and she so easy-minded, unambitious a woman,
that she would not make life a solitude for fastidious reasons. More
than all, she had good ground for thinking that the miller secretly
admired her, and this added a piquancy to the situation.

* * * * *

On a fine summer morning, when the leaves were warm under the sun, and
the more industrious bees abroad, diving into every blue and red cup that
could possibly be considered a flower, Anne was sitting at the back
window of her mother's portion of the house, measuring out lengths of
worsted for a fringed rug that she was making, which lay, about three-
quarters finished, beside her. The work, though chromatically brilliant,
was tedious: a hearth-rug was a thing which nobody worked at from morning
to night; it was taken up and put down; it was in the chair, on the
floor, across the hand-rail, under the bed, kicked here, kicked there,
rolled away in the closet, brought out again, and so on more capriciously
perhaps than any other home-made article. Nobody was expected to finish
a rug within a calculable period, and the wools of the beginning became
faded and historical before the end was reached. A sense of this
inherent nature of worsted-work rather than idleness led Anne to look
rather frequently from the open casement.

Immediately before her was the large, smooth millpond, over-full, and
intruding into the hedge and into the road. The water, with its flowing
leaves and spots of froth, was stealing away, like Time, under the dark
arch, to tumble over the grea