While the listeners were smiling their comments there was a

quick movement behind their backs, and they looked round. Tess,

pale-faced, had gone to the door.

"How warm 'tis to-day!" she said, almost inaudibly.

It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal with the

reminiscences of the dairyman. He went forward and opened the door

for her, saying with tender raillery-

"Why, maidy" (he frequently, with unconscious irony, gave her this

pet name), "the prettiest milker I've got in my dairy; you mustn't

get so fagged as this at the first breath of summer weather, or we

Advertisement..

shall be finely put to for want of 'ee by dog-days, shan't we, Mr

Clare?" "I was faint--and--I think I am better out o' doors," she said

mechanically; and disappeared outside.

Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at that moment

changed its squashing for a decided flick-flack.

"'Tis coming!" cried Mrs Crick, and the attention of all was called

off from Tess. That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally; but she

remained much depressed all the afternoon. When the evening milking

was done she did not care to be with the rest of them, and went out

of doors, wandering along she knew not whither. She was wretched--O

so wretched--at the perception that to her companions the dairyman's

story had been rather a humorous narration than otherwise; none of

them but herself seemed to see the sorrow of it; to a certainty, not

one knew how cruelly it touched the tender place in her experience.

The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in

the sky. Only a solitary cracked-voice reed-sparrow greeted her from

the bushes by the river, in a sad, machine-made tone, resembling that

of a past friend whose friendship she had outworn.

In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed, most of the

household, went to bed at sunset or sooner, the morning work before

milking being so early and heavy at a time of full pails. Tess

usually accompanied her fellows upstairs. To-night, however, she was

the first to go to their common chamber; and she had dozed when the

other girls came in. She saw them undressing in the orange light

of the vanished sun, which flushed their forms with its colour; she

dozed again, but she was reawakened by their voices, and quietly

turned her eyes towards them.

Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed. They were

standing in a group, in their nightgowns, barefooted, at the window,

the last red rays of the west still warming their faces and necks and

the walls around them. All were watching somebody in the garden with

deep interest, their three faces close together: a jovial and round

one, a pale one with dark hair, and a fair one whose tresses were

auburn. "Don't push! You can see as well as I," said Retty, the

auburn-haired and youngest girl, without removing her eyes from the

window. "'Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty

Priddle," said jolly-faced Marian, the eldest, slily.




Most Popular