“No,” she said, becoming grave:  “I have so many things to think of first.”

“But—­”

He drew her gently nearer to him.

The reality of marriage was startling when it loomed so near.  Before discussion of the question had proceeded further there walked round the corner of the settle into the full firelight of the apartment Mr Dairyman Crick, Mrs Crick, and two of the milkmaids.

Tess sprang like an elastic ball from his side to her feet, while her face flushed and her eyes shone in the firelight.

“I knew how it would be if I sat so close to him!” she cried, with vexation.  “I said to myself, they are sure to come and catch us!  But I wasn’t really sitting on his knee, though it might ha’ seemed as if I was almost!”

“Well—­if so be you hadn’t told us, I am sure we shouldn’t ha’ noticed that ye had been sitting anywhere at all in this light,” replied the dairyman.  He continued to his wife, with the stolid mien of a man who understood nothing of the emotions relating to matrimony—­“Now, Christianer, that shows that folks should never fancy other folks be supposing things when they bain’t.  O no, I should never ha’ thought a word of where she was a sitting to, if she hadn’t told me—­not I.”

“We are going to be married soon,” said Clare, with improvised phlegm.

“Ah—­and be ye!  Well, I am truly glad to hear it, sir.  I’ve thought you mid do such a thing for some time.  She’s too good for a dairymaid—­I said so the very first day I zid her—­and a prize for any man; and what’s more, a wonderful woman for a gentleman-farmer’s wife; he won’t be at the mercy of his baily wi’ her at his side.”

Somehow Tess disappeared.  She had been even more struck with the look of the girls who followed Crick than abashed by Crick’s blunt praise.

After supper, when she reached her bedroom, they were all present.  A light was burning, and each damsel was sitting up whitely in her bed, awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts.

But she saw in a few moments that there was no malice in their mood.  They could scarcely feel as a loss what they had never expected to have.  Their condition was objective, contemplative.

“He’s going to marry her!” murmured Retty, never taking eyes off Tess.  “How her face do show it!”

“You BE going to marry him?” asked Marian.

“Yes,” said Tess.

“When?”

“Some day.”

They thought that this was evasiveness only.

“YES—­going to MARRY him—­a gentleman!” repeated Izz Huett.

And by a sort of fascination the three girls, one after another, crept out of their beds, and came and stood barefooted round Tess.  Retty put her hands upon Tess’s shoulders, as if to realize her friend’s corporeality after such a miracle, and the other two laid their arms round her waist, all looking into her face.

“How it do seem!  Almost more than I can think of!” said Izz Huett.