Captain Donnithorne couldn’t like her to go on doing work:  he would like to see her in nice clothes, and thin shoes, and white stockings, perhaps with silk clocks to them; for he must love her very much—­no one else had ever put his arm round her and kissed her in that way.  He would want to marry her and make a lady of her; she could hardly dare to shape the thought—­yet how else could it be?  Marry her quite secretly, as Mr. James, the doctor’s assistant, married the doctor’s niece, and nobody ever found it out for a long while after, and then it was of no use to be angry.  The doctor had told her aunt all about it in Hetty’s hearing.  She didn’t know how it would be, but it was quite plain the old Squire could never be told anything about it, for Hetty was ready to faint with awe and fright if she came across him at the Chase.  He might have been earth-born, for what she knew.  It had never entered her mind that he had been young like other men; he had always been the old Squire at whom everybody was frightened.  Oh, it was impossible to think how it would be!  But Captain Donnithorne would know; he was a great gentleman, and could have his way in everything, and could buy everything he liked.  And nothing could be as it had been again:  perhaps some day she should be a grand lady, and ride in her coach, and dress for dinner in a brocaded silk, with feathers in her hair, and her dress sweeping the ground, like Miss Lydia and Lady Dacey, when she saw them going into the dining-room one evening as she peeped through the little round window in the lobby; only she should not be old and ugly like Miss Lydia, or all the same thickness like Lady Dacey, but very pretty, with her hair done in a great many different ways, and sometimes in a pink dress, and sometimes in a white one—­she didn’t know which she liked best; and Mary Burge and everybody would perhaps see her going out in her carriage—­or rather, they would hear of it:  it was impossible to imagine these things happening at Hayslope in sight of her aunt.  At the thought of all this splendour, Hetty got up from her chair, and in doing so caught the little red-framed glass with the edge of her scarf, so that it fell with a bang on the floor; but she was too eagerly occupied with her vision to care about picking it up; and after a momentary start, began to pace with a pigeon-like stateliness backwards and forwards along her room, in her coloured stays and coloured skirt, and the old black lace scarf round her shoulders, and the great glass ear-rings in her ears.

How pretty the little puss looks in that odd dress!  It would be the easiest folly in the world to fall in love with her:  there is such a sweet babylike roundness about her face and figure; the delicate dark rings of hair lie so charmingly about her ears and neck; her great dark eyes with their long eye-lashes touch one so strangely, as if an imprisoned frisky sprite looked out of them.