Anne had been adding up her little studies of the trumpet-major’s character, and was surprised to find how the brightness of that character increased in her eyes with each examination. A kindly and gentle sensation was again aroused in her. Here was a neglected heroic man, who, loving her to distraction, deliberately doomed himself to pensive shade to avoid even the appearance of standing in a brother’s way.
‘If the altar stood here, hundreds of people have been made man and wife just there, in past times,’ she said, with calm deliberateness, throwing a little stone on a spot about a yard westward.
John annihilated another tender burst and replied, ‘Yes, this field used to be a village. My grandfather could call to mind when there were houses here. But the squire pulled ’em down, because poor folk were an eyesore to him.’
‘Do you know, John, what you once asked me to do?’ she continued, not accepting the digression, and turning her eyes upon him.
‘In what sort of way?’
‘In the matter of my future life, and yours.’
‘I am afraid I don’t.’
‘John Loveday!’
He turned his back upon her for a moment, that she might not see his face. ‘Ah—I do remember,’ he said at last, in a dry, small, repressed voice.
‘Well—need I say more? Isn’t it sufficient?’