t was
her height. She seemed tall, but the pail was a small one, and the
hedge diminutive; hence, making allowance for error by comparison
with these, she could have been not above the height to be chosen by
women as best. All features of consequence were severe and regular.
It may have been observed by persons who go about the shires with
eyes for beauty, that in Englishwoman a classically-formed face is
seldom found to be united with a figure of the same pattern, the
highly-finished features being generally too large for the remainder
of the frame; that a graceful and proportionate figure of eight heads
usually goes off into random facial curves. Without throwing a
Nymphean tissue over a milkmaid, let it be said that here criticism
checked itself as out of place, and looked at her proportions with a
long consciousness of pleasure. From the contours of her figure in
its upper part, she must have had a beautiful neck and shoulders; but
since her infancy nobody had ever seen them. Had she been put into
a low dress she would have run and thrust her head into a bush. Yet
she was not a shy girl by any means; it was merely her instinct to
draw the line dividing the seen from the unseen higher than they do
it in towns.

That the girl's thoughts hovered about her face and form as soon as
she caught Oak's eyes conning the same page was natural, and almost
certain. The self-consciousness shown would have been vanity if
a little more pronounced, dignity if a little less. Rays of male
vision seem to have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural
districts; she brushed hers with her hand, as if Gabriel had been
irritating its pink surface by actual touch, and the free air of her
previous movements was reduced at the same time to a chastened phase
of itself. Yet it was the man who blushed, the maid not at all.

"I found a hat," said Oak.

"It is mine," said she, and, from a sense of proportion, kept down to
a small smile an inclination to laugh distinctly: "it flew away last
night."

"One o'clock this morning?"

"Well--it was." She was surprised. "How did you know?" she said.

"I was here."

"You are Farmer Oak, are you not?"

"That or thereabouts. I'm lately come to this place."

"A large farm?" she inquired, casting her eyes round, and swinging
back her hair, which was black in the shaded hollows of its mass; but
it being now an hour past sunrise the rays touched its prominent
curves with a colour of the