run after you!” However, she seemed to have a short cut for getting back to cheerfulness, and set her face to signify archness. “It wouldn’t do, Mr. Oak. I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you would never be able to, I know.”

Oak cast his eyes down the field in a way implying that it was useless to attempt argument.

“Mr. Oak,” she said, with luminous distinctness and common sense, “you are better off than I. I have hardly a penny in the world—I am staying with my aunt for my bare sustenance. I am better educated than you—and I don’t love you a bit: that’s my side of the case. Now yours: you are a farmer just begining, and you ought in common prudence, if you marry at all (which you should certainly not think of doing at present) to marry a woman with money, who would stock a larger farm for you than you have now.”

Gabriel looked at her with a little surprise and much admiration.

“That’s the very thing I had been thinking myself!” he naïvely said.

Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety of honesty. Bathsheba was decidedly disconcerted.

“Well, then, why did you come and disturb me?” she said, almost angrily, if not quite, an enlarging red spot rising in each cheek.

“I can’t do what I think would be—would be——”

“Right?”

“No: wise.”

“You have made an admission now, Mr. Oak,” she exclaimed, with even more hauteur, and rocking her head disdainfully. “After that, do you think I could marry you? Not if I know it.”

He broke in passionately: “But don’t mistake me like that! Because I am open enough to own what every man in my position would have thought of, you make your colours come up your face, and get crabbed with me. That about your not being good enough for me is nonsense. You speak like a lady—all the parish notice it, and your uncle at Weatherbury is, I have heard, a large farmer—much larger than ever I shall be. May I call in the evening, or will you walk along with me on Sundays? I don’t want you to make up your mind at once, if you’d rather not.”

“No—no—I cannot. Don’t press me any more—don’t. I don’t love you—so ’twould be ridiculous!” she 

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