among all her friends and acquaintances.

Retracing by the light of dawn the road he had followed a few hours earlier under cover of darkness, with his sweetheart by his side, he reached the bottom of the hill, where he walked slowly, and stood still. He was on the spot where he had given her the first kiss. As the sun had only just risen it was possible that nobody had passed there since. Jude looked on the ground and sighed. He looked closely, and could just discern in the damp dust the imprints of their feet as they had stood locked in each other’s arms. She was not there now, and “the embroidery of imagination upon the stuff of nature” so depicted her past presence that a void was in his heart which nothing could fill. A pollard willow stood close to the place, and that willow was different from all other willows in the world. Utter annihilation of the six days which must elapse before he could see her again as he had promised would have been his intensest wish if he had had only the week to live.

An hour and a half later Arabella came along the same way with her two companions of the Saturday. She passed unheedingly the scene of the kiss, and the willow that marked it, though chattering freely on the subject to the other two.

“And what did he tell ’ee next?”

“Then he said—” And she related almost word for word some of his tenderest speeches. If Jude had been behind the fence he would have felt not a little surprised at learning how very few of his sayings and doings on the previous evening were private.

“You’ve got him to care for ’ee a bit, ’nation if you han’t!” murmured Anny judicially. “It’s well to be you!”

In a few moments Arabella replied in a curiously low, hungry tone of latent sensuousness: “I’ve got him to care for me: yes! But I want him to more than care for me; I want him to have me—to marry me! I must have him. I can’t do without him. He’s the sort of man I long for. I shall go mad if I can’t give myself to him altogether! I felt I should when I first saw him!”

“As he is a romancing, straightfor’ard, honest chap, he’s to be had, and as a husband, if you set about catching him in the right way.”

Arabella remained thinking awhile. “What med be the right way?” she asked.

“Oh you don’t know—you don’t!” said Sarah, the third girl.

“On my word I don’t!—No further, 

 Prev. P 32/353 next