How often had that string of excellences made her young heart ache in church of late years, and how strange that he should have cited them now.
"Why didn't you stay and love me when I-was sixteen; living with my little sisters and brothers, and you danced on the green?
O, why didn't you, why didn't you!" she said, impetuously clasping her hands.
Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to himself, truly enough, what a creature of moods she was, and how careful he would have to be of her when she depended for her happiness entirely on him.
"Ah-why didn't I stay!" he said.
"That is just what I feel.
If I had only known!
But you must not be so bitter in your regret-why should you be?"
With the woman's instinct to hide she diverged hastily-"I should have had four years more of your heart than I can ever have now. Then I should not have wasted my time as I have done-I should have had so much longer happiness!"
It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of intrigue behind her who was tormented thus, but a girl of simple life, not yet one-and twenty, who had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird in a springe.
To calm herself the more completely, she rose from her little stool and left the room, overturning the stool with her skirts as she went.
He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown from a bundle of green ash-sticks laid across the dogs; the sticks snapped pleasantly, and hissed out bubbles of sap from their ends.
When she came back she was herself again.
"Do you not think you are just a wee bit capricious, fitful, Tess?" he said, good-humouredly, as he spread a cushion for her on the stool, and seated himself in the settle beside her.
"I wanted to ask you something, and just then you ran away."
"Yes, perhaps I am capricious," she murmured.
She suddenly approached him, and put a hand upon each of his arms.
"No, Angel, I am not really so-by nature, I mean!"
The more particularly to assure him that she was not, she placed herself close to him in the settle, and allowed her head to find a resting-place against Clare's shoulder.
"What did you want to ask me-I am sure I will answer it," she continued humbly.
"Well, you love me, and have agreed to marry me, and hence there follows a thirdly, 'When shall the day be?'"
"I like living like this."
"But I must think of starting in business on my own hook with the new year, or a little later.
And before I get involved in the multifarious details of my new position, I should like to have secured my partner."
"But," she timidly answered, "to talk quite practically, wouldn't it be best not to marry till after all that?-Though I can't bear the thought o' your going away and leaving me here!"
"Of course you cannot-and it is not best in this 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.