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,