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, the more especially as that star was herself. She began to wonder more and more how she could have so persistently held out against his advances before Bob came home to renew girlish memories which had by that time got considerably weakened. Could she not, after all, please the miller, and try to listen to John? By so doing she would make a worthy man happy, the only sacrifice being at worst that of her unworthy self, whose future was no longer valuable. ‘As for Bob, the woman is to be pitied who loves him,’ she reflected indignantly, and persuaded herself that, whoever the woman might be, she was not Anne Garland.
After this there was something of recklessness and something of pleasantry in the young girl’s manner of making herself an example of the triumph of pride and common sense over memory and sentiment. Her attitude had been epitomized in her defiant singing at the time she learnt that Bob was not leal and true. John, as was inevitable, came again almost immediately, drawn thither by the sun of her first smile on him, and the words which had accompanied it. And now instead of going off to her little pursuits upstairs, downstairs, across the room, in the corner, or to any place except where he happened to be, as had been her custom hitherto, she remained seated near him, returning interesting answers to his general remarks, and at every opportunity letting him know that at last he had found favour in her eyes.
The day was fine, and they went out of doors, where Anne endeavoured to seat herself on the sloping stone of the window-sill.
‘How good you have become lately,’ said John, standing over her and smiling in the sunlight which blazed against the wall. ‘I fancy you have stayed at home this afternoon on my account.’
‘Perhaps I have,’ she said gaily—
‘“Do whatever we may for him, dame, we cannot do too much!
For he’s one that has guarded our land.”