It was from Adam that she found out that Captain Donnithorne would be back in a day or two, and this knowledge made her the more kindly disposed towards him.  But for all the world Adam would not have spoken of his love to Hetty yet, till this commencing kindness towards him should have grown into unmistakable love.  He did no more than pluck a rose for her, and walk back to the farm with her arm in his.

When Adam, after stopping a while to chat with the Poysers, had said good-night, Mr. Poyser remarked, “If you can catch Adam for a husband, Hetty, you’ll ride i’ your own spring-cart some day, I’ll be your warrant.”

Her uncle did not see the little toss of the head with which Hetty answered him.  To ride in a spring-cart seemed a very miserable lot indeed to her now.

It was on August 18, when Adam, going home from some work he had been doing at one of the farms, passed through a grove of beeches, and saw, at the end of the avenue, about twenty yards before him, two figures.  They were standing opposite to each other with clasped hands, and they separated with a start at a sharp bark from Adam Bede’s dog.  One hurried away through a gate out of the grove; the other, Arthur Donnithorne, looking flushed and excited, sauntered towards Adam.  The young squire had been home for some weeks celebrating his twenty-first birthday, and he was leaving on the morrow to rejoin his regiment.

Hitherto there had been a cordial and sincere liking and a mutual esteem between the two young men; but now Adam stood as if petrified, and his amazement turned quickly to fierceness.

Arthur tried to pass the matter off lightly, as if it had been a chance meeting with Hetty; but Adam, who felt that he had been robbed treacherously by the man in whom he had trusted, would not so easily let him off.  It came to blows, and Arthur sank under a well-planted blow of Adam’s, as a steel rod is broken by an iron bar.

Before they separated, Arthur promised that he would write and tell Hetty there could be no further communication between them.  And this promise he kept.  Adam rested content with the assurance that nothing but an innocent flirtation had been stopped.  As the days went by he found that the calm patience with which he had waited for Hetty’s love had forsaken him since that night in the beech-grove.  The agitations of jealousy had given a new restlessness to his passion.

Hetty, for her part, after the first misery caused by Arthur’s letter, had turned into a mood of dull despair, and sought only for change.  Why should she not marry Adam?  She did not care what she did so that it made some change in her life.

So, in November, when Mr. Burge offered Adam a share in his business, Adam not only accepted it, but decided that the time had come to ask Hetty to marry him.

Hetty did not speak when Adam got out the question, but his face was very close to hers, and she put up her round cheek against his, like a kitten.  She wanted to be caressed—­she wanted to feel as if Arthur were with her again.