ards the open door. Beyond the
cherry-red phloxes outside it the ground fell rapidly to the village,
rising again beyond the houses to a great stubble field, newly shorn.
Gleaners were already in the field, their bent figures casting sharp
shadows on the golden upland, and the field itself stretched upwards to
a great wood that lay folded round the top of a spreading hill. To the
left, beyond the hill, a wide plain travelled into the sunset, its
level spaces cut by the scrawled elms and hedgerows of the nearer
landscape. The beauty of it all--the beauty of an English midland--was
of a modest and measured sort, depending chiefly on bounties of sun and
air, on the delicacies of gentle curves and the pleasant intermingling
of wood and cornfield, of light spaces with dark, of solid earth and
luminous sky.

Such as it was, however, neither Bessie nor John spared it a moment's
attention. Bessie was thinking a hundred busy thoughts. John, on the
other hand, had begun to consider her with an excited scrutiny. She
was a handsome woman, as she sat in the doorway with her fine brown
head turned to the light. But John naturally was not thinking of that.
He was in the throes of decision.

"Look 'ere, Bessie," he said suddenly; "what 'ud you say if I wor to
ask Isaac an' you to take care on it?"

Bessie started slightly. Then she looked frankly round at him. She
had very keen, lively eyes, and a bright red-brown colour on thin
cheeks. The village applied to her the epithet which John's thoughts
had applied to Muster Hill's widow. They said she was "caselty," which
means flighty, haphazard, excitable; but she was popular, nevertheless,
and had many friends.

It was, of course, her own settled opinion that her uncle ought to
leave that box with her and Isaac; and it had wounded her vanity, and
her affection besides, that John had never yet made any such proposal,
though she knew--as, indeed, the village knew--that he was perplexed as
to what to do with his hoard. But she had never dared to suggest that
he should leave it with her, out of fear of Eliza Bolderfield. Bessie
was well aware that Eliza thought ill of her, and would dissuade John
from any such arrangement if she could. And so formidable was Eliza--a
woman of the hardest and sourest virtue--when she chose, that Bessie
was afraid of her, even on her deathbed, though generally ready enough
to quarrel with other people. Nevertheless, Bessie had always felt
tha