“And were you indeed?”

“Yes. Because if she would, I should be very glad to marry her. D’ye know if she’s got any other young man hanging about her at all?”

“Let me think,” said Mrs. Hurst, poking the fire superfluously…. “Yes—bless you, ever so many young men. You see, Farmer Oak, she’s so good-looking, and an excellent scholar besides—she was going to be a governess once, you know, only she was too wild. Not that her young men ever come here—but, Lord, in the nature of women, she must have a dozen!”

“That’s unfortunate,” said Farmer Oak, contemplating a crack in the stone floor with sorrow. “I’m only an every-day sort of man, and my only chance was in being the first comer. . . . Well, there’s no use in my waiting, for that was all I came about: so I’ll take myself off home-along, Mrs. Hurst.”

When Gabriel had gone about two hundred yards along the down, he heard a “hoi-hoi!” uttered behind him, in a piping note of more treble quality than that in which the exclamation usually embodies itself when shouted across a field. He looked round, and saw a girl racing after him, waving a white handkerchief.

Oak stood still—and the runner drew nearer. It was Bathsheba Everdene. Gabriel’s colour deepened: hers was already deep, not, as it appeared, from emotion, but from running.

“Farmer Oak—I—” she said, pausing for want of breath pulling up in front of him with a slanted face, and putting her hand to her side.

“I have just called to see you,” said Gabriel, pending her further speech.

“Yes—I know that!” she said, panting like a robin, her face red and moist from her exertions, like a peony petal before the sun dries off the dew. “I didn’t know you had come (pant) to ask to have me, or I should have come in from the garden instantly. I ran after you to say (pant) that my aunt made a mistake in sending you away from courting me (pant)——”

Gabriel expanded. “I’m sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear,” he said, with a grateful sense of favours to come. “Wait a bit till you’ve found your breath.”

“—It was quite a mistake—aunt’s telling you I had a young man already.” Bathsheba went on. “I haven’t a sweetheart at all (pant), and I never had one, and I thought that, as times go with women, it was _such_ a pity to send you away thinking that I had several.”

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