rivial account.

After listening under the bank for some minutes to the talk he turned
in a perplexed and doubting manner and began to withdraw as silently
as he had come. That he did not, upon the whole, think it advisable
to interrupt her conversation with Wildeve, without being prepared to
bear the whole weight of her displeasure, was obvious.

Here was a Scyllaeo-Charybdean position for a poor boy. Pausing
when again safe from discovery, he finally decided to face the pit
phenomenon as the lesser evil. With a heavy sigh he retraced the
slope, and followed the path he had followed before.

The light had gone, the rising dust had disappeared--he hoped for
ever. He marched resolutely along, and found nothing to alarm him
till, coming within a few yards of the sandpit, he heard a slight
noise in front, which led him to halt. The halt was but momentary,
for the noise resolved itself into the steady bites of two animals
grazing.

"Two he'th-croppers down here," he said aloud. "I have never known
'em come down so far afore."

The animals were in the direct line of his path, but that the child
thought little of; he had played round the fetlocks of horses from his
infancy. On coming nearer, however, the boy was somewhat surprised to
find that the little creatures did not run off, and that each wore a
clog, to prevent his going astray; this signified that they had been
broken in. He could now see the interior of the pit, which, being in
the side of the hill, had a level entrance. In the innermost corner
the square outline of a van appeared, with its back towards him. A
light came from the interior, and threw a moving shadow upon the
vertical face of gravel at the further side of the pit into which the
vehicle faced.

The child assumed that this was the cart of a gipsy, and his dread
of those wanderers reached but to that mild pitch which titillates
rather than pains. Only a few inches of mud wall kept him and his
family from being gipsies themselves. He skirted the gravel-pit at
a respectful distance, ascended the slope, and came forward upon
the brow, in order to look into the open door of the van and see the
original of the shadow.

The picture alarmed the boy. By a little stove inside the van sat
a figure red from head to heels--the man who had been Thomasin's
friend. He was darning a stocking, which was red like the rest of him.
Moreover, as he darned he smoked a pipe, the stem and bowl of which
were red also.