Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy. The denizens were

all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the

exceedingly early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity.

At the door the wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite

scrubbings, hung like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb

of an oak fixed there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry

for the evening milking. Angel entered, and went through the silent

passages of the house to the back quarters, where he listened for a

moment. Sustained snores came from the cart-house, where some of

the men were lying down; the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs

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arose from the still further distance. The large-leaved rhubarb and

cabbage plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces hanging in the

sun like half-closed umbrellas.

He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the

clock struck three. Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with

the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and

then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs. It was Tess's,

who in another moment came down before his eyes.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.

She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it

had been a snake's. She had stretched one arm so high above her

coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above

the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung

heavy over their pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed

from her. It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than

at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself

flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness,

before the remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly

compounded look of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed--"O

Mr Clare! How you frightened me--I--"

There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed

relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of

the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare's tender

look as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.

"Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm round her, and

his face to her flushed cheek. "Don't, for Heaven's sake, Mister me

any more. I have hastened back so soon because of you!"

Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there

they stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in

by the window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast;

upon her inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her

naked arm, and her neck, and into the depths of her hair. Having

been lying down in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat. At

first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon

lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with

their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet,

while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have

regarded Adam.




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