Milly Greenacre stood at her garden gate as the stream went by; old Jimmy looked out of his bedroom window in his cotton night-cap, and cheered in his cracked old voice.
All his life long Geo will remember the dim outline of Milly's figure, white against the background of the lilac bushes, and the quaint, whimsical face of the old man peering into the darkness, and looking at him, for the first time of his life, with approval. It was only an instantaneous snapshot from the lanterns carried by some of the party that revealed the picture to him, but it was photographed for ever on his brain, and it was not one of the least among the pleasurable things Geo looked back to when all the excitement was over, and he had settled down to steady work as he said he would.
It is often said that no great work can be accomplished without some correspondingly great sacrifice, and the fever was not stamped out and the water supply made pure without the suffering of an innocent victim in the good cause. And scarcely had the excitement over the accident at the well abated, when Willowton learned that one of the chief directors of the movement--their vicar--was dangerously ill. The long strain, physical and mental, of his resolute fight for the right, the senseless opposition his flock had met him with all through those weary months of work and disappointment, had told on him at last, and when the moment of victory came he succumbed, and three days later he was raging in the delirium of fever. And then, but only then, the wiseacres of the village remarked to each other that they had "minded he looked wonderful quare the last few Sundays--kind a' dazed like;" and the old women had noticed his thin cheeks and restless eye. Yet none of them had ever thought of saying a kind word to him when he called at their cottages, and all had greeted him with the sullen manner they had adopted, as if by common consent, since he had begun his crusade against dirt and insanitariness.
On the evening of that day the doctor's dogcart stopped at Mrs. Lummis's door. He had been such a frequent visitor there during her illness that nobody attached any importance to his visit; though Mrs. Lummis was up and about again, but not yet able to do entirely for herself. But the neighbours did stare when, a quarter of an hour later, Geo came out with a bundle and climbed into the cart alongside him, and drove away up the village with him. And they would have stared harder if they had known whither Geo was bound.