‘You should think more of this,’ she had said to him at last.  ’If you would really have me for your wife, it will not be much to you to return here again when time for thinking of it shall have passed by.’  With these words she had dismissed him, and now he had again come back to Oxney Colne.  But still she would not place herself at the window to look for him, nor dress herself in other than her simple morning country dress, nor omit one item of her daily work.  If he wished to take her at all, he should wish to take her as she really was, in her plain country life, but he should take her also with full observance of all those privileges which maidens are allowed to claim from their lovers.  He should curtail no ceremonious observance because she was the daughter of a poor country parson who would come to him without a shilling, whereas he stood high in the world’s books.  He had asked her to give him all that she had, and that all she was ready to give, without stint.  But the gift must be valued before it could be given or received.  He also was to give her as much, and she would accept it as being beyond all price.  But she would not allow that that which was offered to her was in any degree the more precious because of his outward worldly standing.

She would not pretend to herself that she thought he would come to her that afternoon, and therefore she busied herself in the kitchen and about the house, giving directions to her two maids as though the day would pass as all other days did pass in that household.  They usually dined at four, and she rarely, in these summer months, went far from the house before that hour.  At four precisely she sat down with her father, and then said that she was going up as far as Helpholme after dinner.  Helpholme was a solitary farmhouse in another parish, on the border of the moor, and Mr. Woolsworthy asked her whether he should accompany her.

‘Do, papa,’ she said, ‘if you are not too tired.’  And yet she had thought how probable it might be that she should meet John Broughton on her walk.  And so it was arranged; but, just as dinner was over, Mr. Woolsworthy remembered himself.

‘Gracious me,’ he said, ’how my memory is going!  Gribbles, from Ivybridge, and old John Poulter, from Bovey, are coming to meet here by appointment.  You can’t put Helpholme off till tomorrow?’

Patience, however, never put off anything, and therefore at six o’clock, when her father had finished his slender modicum of toddy, she tied on her hat and went on her walk.  She started forth with a quick step, and left no word to say by which route she would go.  As she passed up along the little lane which led towards Oxney Colne she would not even look to see if he was coming towards her; and when she left the road, passing over a stone stile into a little path which ran first through the upland fields, and then across the moor ground towards Helpholme, she did not look back once, or listen for his coming step.