“I quite forgot the engagement,” murmured Farfrae.

“Now you must go,” said she; “must you not?”

“Yes,” he replied.  But he still remained.

“You had better go,” she urged.  “You will lose a customer.

“Now, Miss Templeman, you will make me angry,” exclaimed Farfrae.

“Then suppose you don’t go; but stay a little longer?”

He looked anxiously at the farmer who was seeking him and who just then ominously walked across to where Henchard was standing, and he looked into the room and at her.  “I like staying; but I fear I must go!” he said.  “Business ought not to be neglected, ought it?

“Not for a single minute.”

“It’s true.  I’ll come another time—­if I may, ma’am?”

“Certainly,” she said.  “What has happened to us to-day is very curious.”

“Something to think over when we are alone, it’s like to be?”

“Oh, I don’t know that.  It is commonplace after all.”

“No, I’ll not say that.  O no!”

“Well, whatever it has been, it is now over; and the market calls you to be gone.”

“Yes, yes.  Market—­business!  I wish there were no business in the warrld.”

Lucetta almost laughed—­she would quite have laughed—­but that there was a little emotion going in her at the time.  “How you change!” she said.  “You should not change like this.

“I have never wished such things before,” said the Scotchman, with a simple, shamed, apologetic look for his weakness.  “It is only since coming here and seeing you!”

“If that’s the case, you had better not look at me any longer.  Dear me, I feel I have quite demoralized you!”

“But look or look not, I will see you in my thoughts.  Well, I’ll go—­thank you for the pleasure of this visit.”

“Thank you for staying.”

“Maybe I’ll get into my market-mind when I’ve been out a few minutes,” he murmured.  “But I don’t know—­I don’t know!”

As he went she said eagerly, “You may hear them speak of me in Casterbridge as time goes on.  If they tell you I’m a coquette, which some may, because of the incidents of my life, don’t believe it, for I am not.”

“I swear I will not!” he said fervidly.

Thus the two.  She had enkindled the young man’s enthusiasm till he was quite brimming with sentiment; while he from merely affording her a new form of idleness, had gone on to wake her serious solicitude.  Why was this?  They could not have told.

Lucetta as a young girl would hardly have looked at a tradesman.  But her ups and downs, capped by her indiscretions with Henchard had made her uncritical as to station.  In her poverty she had met with repulse from the society to which she had belonged, and she had no great zest for renewing an attempt upon it now.  Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest.  Rough or smooth she did not care so long as it was warm.