Once, in her anxiety to have everything exactly right for her sister, Hannah asked Master Necronsett about Captain Winthrop’s being there so much.

“Master Doctor, will not Captain Winthrop absorb, perchance, some of the great virtue of the plant away from Ann Mary?  Will he not hurt her cure?”

Grandmother never says so, but I have always imagined that even that carven image of an old aborigine must, have smiled a little as he told her: 

“Nay, the young man will not hurt your sister’s cure.”

At the end of September, something tremendously exciting happened to Hannah.  She had been so busy learning the contents of that old calf-bound book that she had never noticed how a light seemed to shine right through Ann Mary’s lovely face every time Captain Winthrop looked at her.  The little student was the most surprised girl in the world when the young soldier told her, one morning in the granary, that he wanted her sister to marry him, and that Ann Mary wanted it, too, if Hannah would allow it.

He laughed a little as he said this last, but he looked anxiously at her, for Ann Mary, who was as sweet as she was pretty and useless, had felt it to be a poor return for Hannah’s devotion, now after all, just to go off and desert her.  She had said that, if Hannah thought she ought to, she would go back to Hillsboro, and they would have to wait ever so long.  So now Captain Winthrop looked very nervously at Ann Mary’s little sister.

But he did not know Hannah.  She gave a little cry, as if someone had stabbed her, turned very pale, and, leaving her wheel still whirling, she ran like the wind toward Dr. Necronsett’s.  She wanted to see her sister; she wanted to see if this——­

Close to the minister’s house she met Ann Mary, who could not wait any longer, and was coming to meet her.  After one glimpse of that beautiful, radiant face, Hannah fell a weeping for very joy that her dear Ann Mary was so happy, and was to marry the grand and learned and goodly Captain Winthrop.

There was not a thought in Hannah’s mind, then or later, that she must lose Ann Mary herself.  Grandmother explains here that the truth is that a heart like Hannah’s cannot lose anything good; and perhaps that is so.

Thus, hand in hand, laughing and crying together, the two girls came back to the granary, where Ann Mary’s lover took her in his arms and kissed her many times out of light-heartedness that Hannah would put no obstacle in the way.  This made little Hannah blush and feel very queer.  She looked away, and there was her wheel still languidly stirring a little.  Dear me!  How many, many times have I heard the next detail in the story told!

“And, without really, so to speak, sensing what she was doing, didn’t she put her hand to the rim and start it up again?  And when the other two looked around at her, there she was, spinning and smiling, with the tears in her eyes.  It had all happened in less time than it takes a spin-wheel to run down.”