he pity. She'll get neither a place nor
a husband any the sooner for it. Sober well-to-do men don't like such
pretty wives. When I was a girl, I was more admired than if I had been
so very pretty. However, she's reason to be grateful to me for teaching
her something to get her bread with, better than farm-house work. They
always told me I was good-natured--and that's the truth, and to my hurt
too, else there's them in this house that wouldn't be here now to lord
it over me in the housekeeper's room."

Hetty walked hastily across the short space of pleasure-ground which she
had to traverse, dreading to meet Mr. Craig, to whom she could hardly
have spoken civilly. How relieved she was when she had got safely under
the oaks and among the fern of the Chase! Even then she was as ready to
be startled as the deer that leaped away at her approach. She thought
nothing of the evening light that lay gently in the grassy alleys
between the fern, and made the beauty of their living green more visible
than it had been in the overpowering flood of noon: she thought of
nothing that was present. She only saw something that was possible: Mr.
Arthur Donnithorne coming to meet her again along the Fir-tree Grove.
That was the foreground of Hetty's picture; behind it lay a bright hazy
something--days that were not to be as the other days of her life had
been. It was as if she had been wooed by a river-god, who might any
time take her to his wondrous halls below a watery heaven. There was no
knowing what would come, since this strange entrancing delight had come.
If a chest full of lace and satin and jewels had been sent her from some
unknown source, how could she but have thought that her whole lot was
going to change, and that to-morrow some still more bewildering joy
would befall her? Hetty had never read a novel; if she had ever seen
one, I think the words would have been too hard for her; how then could
she find a shape for her expectations? They were as formless as the
sweet languid odours of the garden at the Chase, which had floated past
her as she walked by the gate.

She is at another gate now--that leading into Fir-tree Grove. She enters
the wood, where it is already twilight, and at every step she takes, the
fear at her heart becomes colder. If he should not come! Oh, how dreary
it was--the thought of going out at the other end of the wood, into the
unsheltered road, without having seen him. She reaches the first turning
towards