A pang shot through her heart. Thus had the doctor's gig sounded
the night he came,--alas, too late! How long and how intensely she
had listened for that! She first heard it just beyond the mile-
stone. This one must be a good bit on this side of it; up the hill,
in fact. She could not help listening. It was so like, so terribly
like! Now it spun along the level ground. Ah, the doctor had not
hurried so! Now it was at the mill, at the door, and--it stopped.

The miller's wife rose to run out, she hardly knew why. But in a
moment she checked herself, and went back to her seat.

"I be crazed, surely," said the poor woman, sitting down again.
"There be more gigs than one in the world, and folk often stops to
ask their way of the maester."

These travellers were a long time about the putting of such a simple
question, especially as the night was not a pleasant one to linger
out in. The murmur of voices, too, which the woman overheard,
betokened a close conversation, in which the familiar drawl of the
windmiller's dialect blended audibly with that kind of clean-clipt
speaking peculiar to gentlefolk.

"He've been talking to master's five minute an' more," muttered the
miller's wife. "What can 'ee want with un?" The talking ceased as
she spoke, and the windmiller appeared, followed by a woman carrying
a young baby in her arms.

He was a ruddy man for his age at any time, but there was an extra
flush on his cheeks just now, and some excitement in his manner,
making him look as his wife was not wont to see him more than once a