In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed, most of the
household, went to bed at sunset or sooner, the morning work before
milking being so early and heavy at a time of full pails. Tess
usually accompanied her fellows upstairs. To-night, however, she was
the first to go to their common chamber; and she had dozed when the
other girls came in. She saw them undressing in the orange light
of the vanished sun, which flushed their forms with its colour; she
dozed again, but she was reawakened by their voices, and quietly
turned her eyes towards them.
Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed. They were
standing in a group, in their nightgowns, barefooted, at the window,
the last red rays of the west still warming their faces and necks and
the walls around them. All were watching somebody in the garden with
deep interest, their three faces close together: a jovial and round
one, a pale one with dark hair, and a fair one whose tresses were
auburn.
'Don't push! You can see as well as I,' said Retty, the
auburn-haired and youngest girl, without removing her eyes from the
window.
''Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty
Priddle,' said jolly-faced Marian, the eldest, slily. 'His thoughts
be of other cheeks than thine!'
Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again.
'There he is again!' cried Izz Huett, the pale girl with dark damp
hair and keenly cut lips.
'You needn't say anything, Izz,' answered Retty. 'For I zid you
kissing his shade.'
'WHAT did you see her doing?' asked Marian.
'Why--he was standing over the whey-tub to let off the whey, and the
shade of his face came upon the wall behind, close to Izz, who was
standing there filling a vat. She put her mouth against the wall and
kissed the shade of his mouth; I zid her, though he didn't.'
'O Izz Huett!' said Marian.
A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett's cheek.
'Well, there was no harm in it,' she declared, with attempted
coolness. 'And if I be in love wi'en, so is Retty, too; and so be
you, Marian, come to that.'
Marian's full face could not blush past its chronic pinkness.
'I!' she said. 'What a tale! Ah, there he is again! Dear
eyes--dear face--dear Mr Clare!'
'There--you've owned it!'
'So have you--so have we all,' said Marian, with the dry frankness of
complete indifference to opinion. 'It is silly to pretend otherwise
amongst ourselves, though we need not own it to other folks. I would
just marry 'n to-morrow!'
'So would I--and more,' murmured Izz Huett.
'And I too,' whispered the more timid Retty.
The listener grew warm.
'We can't all marry him,' said Izz.
'We shan't, either of us; which is worse still,' said the eldest.
