"She'll write soon, depend upon't. Come, 'tis wrong to stay here and

brood so."

He admitted it, but said he could not help it. "Whether she write or

no, I shall fetch her in a few days." And thus speaking, he covered the

track, and preceded his wife indoors.

Melbury, perhaps, was an unlucky man in having within him the sentiment

which could indulge in this foolish fondness about the imprint of a

daughter's footstep. Nature does not carry on her government with a

view to such feelings, and when advancing years render the open hearts

of those who possess them less dexterous than formerly in shutting

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against the blast, they must suffer "buffeting at will by rain and

storm" no less than Little Celandines.

But her own existence, and not Mr. Melbury's, was the centre of Marty's

consciousness, and it was in relation to this that the matter struck

her as she slowly withdrew.

"That, then, is the secret of it all," she said. "And Giles

Winterborne is not for me, and the less I think of him the better."

She returned to her cottage. The sovereigns were staring at her from

the looking-glass as she had left them. With a preoccupied

countenance, and with tears in her eyes, she got a pair of scissors,

and began mercilessly cutting off the long locks of her hair, arranging

and tying them with their points all one way, as the barber had

directed. Upon the pale scrubbed deal of the coffin-stool table they

stretched like waving and ropy weeds over the washed gravel-bed of a

clear stream.

She would not turn again to the little looking-glass, out of humanity

to herself, knowing what a deflowered visage would look back at her,

and almost break her heart; she dreaded it as much as did her own

ancestral goddess Sif the reflection in the pool after the rape of her

locks by Loke the malicious. She steadily stuck to business, wrapped

the hair in a parcel, and sealed it up, after which she raked out the

fire and went to bed, having first set up an alarum made of a candle

and piece of thread, with a stone attached.

But such a reminder was unnecessary to-night. Having tossed till about

five o'clock, Marty heard the sparrows walking down their long holes in

the thatch above her sloping ceiling to their orifice at the eaves;

whereupon she also arose, and descended to the ground-floor again.

It was still dark, but she began moving about the house in those

automatic initiatory acts and touches which represent among housewives

the installation of another day. While thus engaged she heard the

rumbling of Mr. Melbury's wagons, and knew that there, too, the day's

toil had begun.




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