case. I want you
to help me in many ways in making my start. When shall it be? Why
not a fortnight from now?"

"No," she said, becoming grave: "I have so many things to think of
first."

"But--"

He drew her gently nearer to him.

The reality of marriage was startling when it loomed so near. Before
discussion of the question had proceeded further there walked round
the corner of the settle into the full firelight of the apartment Mr
Dairyman Crick, Mrs Crick, and two of the milkmaids.

Tess sprang like an elastic ball from his side to her feet, while her
face flushed and her eyes shone in the firelight.

"I knew how it would be if I sat so close to him!" she cried, with
vexation. "I said to myself, they are sure to come and catch us!
But I wasn't really sitting on his knee, though it might ha' seemed
as if I was almost!"

"Well--if so be you hadn't told us, I am sure we shouldn't ha'
noticed that ye had been sitting anywhere at all in this light,"
replied the dairyman. He continued to his wife, with the stolid
mien of a man who understood nothing of the emotions relating to
matrimony--"Now, Christianer, that shows that folks should never
fancy other folks be supposing things when they bain't. O no, I
should never ha' thought a word of where she was a sitting to, if
she hadn't told me--not I."

"We are going to be married soon," said Clare, with improvised
phlegm.

"Ah--and be ye! Well, I am truly glad to hear it, sir. I've
thought you mid do such a thing for some time. She's too good for a
dairymaid--I said so the very first day I zid her--and a prize for
any man; and what's more, a wonderful woman for a gentleman-farmer's
wife; he won't be at the mercy of his baily wi' her at his side."

Somehow Tess disappeared. She had been even more struck with the
look of the girls who followed Crick than abashed by Crick's blunt
praise.

After supper, when she reached her bedroom, they were all present. A
light was burning, and each damsel was sitting up whitely in her bed,
awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts.

But she saw in a few moments that there was no malice in their mood.
They could scarcely feel as a loss what they had never expected to
have. Their condition was objective, contemplative.

"He's going to marry her!" murmured Retty, never taking eyes off
Tess. "How her face do show it!"

"You BE going to marry him?" asked Marian.

"Yes," said Tess.

"When?"

"Some da