“Just one!” he coaxed.

“Shan’t!” she said.

He, surprised: “What’s the matter?”

She kept her two lips resentfully together, and Jude followed her like a pet lamb till she slackened her pace and walked beside him, talking calmly on indifferent subjects, and always checking him if he tried to take her hand or clasp her waist. Thus they descended to the precincts of her father’s homestead, and Arabella went in, nodding good-bye to him with a supercilious, affronted air.

“I expect I took too much liberty with her, somehow,” Jude said to himself, as he withdrew with a sigh and went on to Marygreen.

On Sunday morning the interior of Arabella’s home was, as usual, the scene of a grand weekly cooking, the preparation of the special Sunday dinner. Her father was shaving before a little glass hung on the mullion of the window, and her mother and Arabella herself were shelling beans hard by. A neighbour passed on her way home from morning service at the nearest church, and seeing Donn engaged at the window with the razor, nodded and came in.

She at once spoke playfully to Arabella: “I zeed ’ee running with ’un—hee-hee! I hope ’tis coming to something?”

Arabella merely threw a look of consciousness into her face without raising her eyes.

“He’s for Christminster, I hear, as soon as he can get there.”

“Have you heard that lately—quite lately?” asked Arabella with a jealous, tigerish indrawing of breath.

“Oh no! But it has been known a long time that it is his plan. He’s on’y waiting here for an opening. Ah well: he must walk about with somebody, I s’pose. Young men don’t mean much now-a-days. ’Tis a sip here and a sip there with ’em. ’Twas different in my time.”

When the gossip had departed Arabella said suddenly to her mother: “I want you and Father to go and inquire how the Edlins be, this evening after tea. Or no—there’s evening service at Fensworth—you can walk to that.”

“Oh? What’s up to-night, then?”

“Nothing. Only I want the house to myself. He’s shy; and I can’t get un to come in when you are here. I shall let him slip through my fingers if I don’t mind, much as I care for ’n!”

“If it is fine we 

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