When he reached home his mother said, ‘Well?’ before he had entered the room.

‘She is not tall.  She is rather short,’ he replied.

‘Ah!’ said his mother, with satisfaction.

‘But she’s very pretty—­very.  In fact, she’s lovely.’

The youthful freshness of the yeoman’s wife had evidently made an impression even on the somewhat hard nature of the boy.

‘That’s all I want to hear,’ said his mother quickly.  ’Now, spread the table-cloth.  The hare you caught is very tender; but mind that nobody catches you.—­You’ve never told me what sort of hands she had.’

’I have never seen ’em.  She never took off her gloves.’

‘What did she wear this morning?’

’A white bonnet and a silver-coloured gownd.  It whewed and whistled so loud when it rubbed against the pews that the lady coloured up more than ever for very shame at the noise, and pulled it in to keep it from touching; but when she pushed into her seat, it whewed more than ever.  Mr. Lodge, he seemed pleased, and his waistcoat stuck out, and his great golden seals hung like a lord’s; but she seemed to wish her noisy gownd anywhere but on her.’

‘Not she!  However, that will do now.’

These descriptions of the newly-married couple were continued from time to time by the boy at his mother’s request, after any chance encounter he had had with them.  But Rhoda Brook, though she might easily have seen young Mrs. Lodge for herself by walking a couple of miles, would never attempt an excursion towards the quarter where the farmhouse lay.  Neither did she, at the daily milking in the dairyman’s yard on Lodge’s outlying second farm, ever speak on the subject of the recent marriage.  The dairyman, who rented the cows of Lodge, and knew perfectly the tall milkmaid’s history, with manly kindliness always kept the gossip in the cow-barton from annoying Rhoda.  But the atmosphere thereabout was full of the subject during the first days of Mrs. Lodge’s arrival; and from her boy’s description and the casual words of the other milkers, Rhoda Brook could raise a mental image of the unconscious Mrs Lodge that was realistic as a photograph.

CHAPTER III—­A VISION

One night, two or three weeks after the bridal return, when the boy was gone to bed, Rhoda sat a long time over the turf ashes that she had raked out in front of her to extinguish them.  She contemplated so intently the new wife, as presented to her in her mind’s eye over the embers, that she forgot the lapse of time.  At last, wearied with her day’s work, she too retired.