the second… Pooh—he won’t care! He’ll be glad I was wrong in what I said. He’ll shake down, bless ’ee—men always do. What can ’em do otherwise? Married is married.”

Nevertheless it was with a little uneasiness that Arabella approached the time when in the natural course of things she would have to reveal that the alarm she had raised had been without foundation. The occasion was one evening at bedtime, and they were in their chamber in the lonely cottage by the wayside to which Jude walked home from his work every day. He had worked hard the whole twelve hours, and had retired to rest before his wife. When she came into the room he was between sleeping and waking, and was barely conscious of her undressing before the little looking-glass as he lay.

One action of hers, however, brought him to full cognition. Her face being reflected towards him as she sat, he could perceive that she was amusing herself by artificially producing in each cheek the dimple before alluded to, a curious accomplishment of which she was mistress, effecting it by a momentary suction. It seemed to him for the first time that the dimples were far oftener absent from her face during his intercourse with her nowadays than they had been in the earlier weeks of their acquaintance.

“Don’t do that, Arabella!” he said suddenly. “There is no harm in it, but—I don’t like to see you.”

She turned and laughed. “Lord, I didn’t know you were awake!” she said. “How countrified you are! That’s nothing.”

“Where did you learn it?”

“Nowhere that I know of. They used to stay without any trouble when I was at the public-house; but now they won’t. My face was fatter then.”

“I don’t care about dimples. I don’t think they improve a woman—particularly a married woman, and of full-sized figure like you.”

“Most men think otherwise.”

“I don’t care what most men think, if they do. How do you know?”

“I used to be told so when I was serving in the tap-room.”

“Ah—that public-house experience accounts for your knowing about the adulteration of the ale when we went and had some that Sunday evening. I thought when I married you that you had always lived in your father’s house.”

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