Mr. Craig smiled and winked slowly as he made this last observation, but the subject was not developed farther, for now they had reached the turning in the road where Adam and his companions must say “good-bye.”  The gardener, too, would have had to turn off in the same direction if he had not accepted Mr. Poyser’s invitation to tea.  Mrs. Poyser duly seconded the invitation, for she would have held it a deep disgrace not to make her neighbours welcome to her house:  personal likes and dislikes must not interfere with that sacred custom.  Moreover, Mr. Craig had always been full of civilities to the family at the Hall Farm, and Mrs. Poyser was scrupulous in declaring that she had “nothing to say again’ him, on’y it was a pity he couldna be hatched o’er again, an’ hatched different.”

So Adam and Seth, with their mother between them, wound their way down to the valley and up again to the old house, where a saddened memory had taken the place of a long, long anxiety—­where Adam would never have to ask again as he entered, “Where’s Father?”

And the other family party, with Mr. Craig for company, went back to the pleasant bright house-place at the Hall Farm—­all with quiet minds, except Hetty, who knew now where Arthur was gone, but was only the more puzzled and uneasy.  For it appeared that his absence was quite voluntary; he need not have gone—­he would not have gone if he had wanted to see her.  She had a sickening sense that no lot could ever be pleasant to her again if her Thursday night’s vision was not to be fulfilled; and in this moment of chill, bare, wintry disappointment and doubt, she looked towards the possibility of being with Arthur again, of meeting his loving glance, and hearing his soft words with that eager yearning which one may call the “growing pain” of passion.

Chapter XIX

Adam on a Working Day

Notwithstanding Mr. Craig’s prophecy, the dark-blue cloud dispersed itself without having produced the threatened consequences.  “The weather”—­as he observed the next morning—­“the weather, you see, ’s a ticklish thing, an’ a fool ’ull hit on’t sometimes when a wise man misses; that’s why the almanecks get so much credit.  It’s one o’ them chancy things as fools thrive on.”

This unreasonable behaviour of the weather, however, could displease no one else in Hayslope besides Mr. Craig.  All hands were to be out in the meadows this morning as soon as the dew had risen; the wives and daughters did double work in every farmhouse, that the maids might give their help in tossing the hay; and when Adam was marching along the lanes, with his basket of tools over his shoulder, he caught the sound of jocose talk and ringing laughter from behind the hedges.  The jocose talk of hay-makers is best at a distance; like those clumsy bells round the cows’ necks, it has rather a coarse sound when it comes close, and may even grate on your ears painfully; but heard from far off, it mingles very prettily with the other joyous sounds of nature.  Men’s muscles move better when their souls are making merry music, though their merriment is of a poor blundering sort, not at all like the merriment of birds.